Superfund: Progress Made by EPA and Other Federal Agencies to Resolve Program Management Issues

摘要

This report addresses whether EPA and other selected federal agencies are setting risk-based cleanup priorities under the Superfund law and whether EPA is recovering cleanup costs and managing its cleanup contractors as efficiently as possible. We are making recommendations to the Administrator of EPA designed to improve the agency's information on and management of cleanups of high-risk sites, maximize EPA'S recovery of cleanup costs, and help prevent EPA from incurring unnecessary costs for contractors' work. The magnitude of the nation's hazardous waste problem calls for making effective use of limited available funds. Current estimates indicate that cleanups are expected to cost the federal government about $300 billion and the private sector hundreds of billions more. Since the early 1990s, GAO has identified several long-standing management problems with the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Superfund program, created under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and liability Act of 1980. These problems have hindered the agency's ability to effectively manage cleanups of the nation's most hazardous sites. This report assesses (1) the efforts that EPA and the other federal agencies with major cleanup responsibilities have made to set priorities for spending limited cleanup funds at the sites posing the highest risks, (2) EPA'S actions to recover its expenditures for cleanups from the parties that are legally liable for the contamination, and (3) EPA'S efforts to better control contractors' cleanup costs.