Senators call for reforms to EPA Superfund system

While newly minted state Superfund laws face a multi-state lawsuit, senators declared the law they’re based on “broken.”

Senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee lamented the state of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as the “Superfund” law, during a Wednesday hearing. Through the law, the Environmental Protection Agency can retroactively require responsible parties to pay for the cleanup and remediation of environmental pollution.

The committee’s main gripe was that though the law is a powerful tool for protecting the environment, the process the EPA is required to follow to hold polluters responsible is too complex and time-consuming. The hearing focused on ways to improve the law to execute its goals faster—or, as Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) put it, “stop this eternal process of planning and actually do the damn cleanup.”

Hearing witness Robert Fox, a senior partner at environmental law firm Manko, Gold, Katcher & Fox, said the EPA should fund pollution cleanups using “mixed funding,” or EPA funding combined with funds from the responsible parties to prevent the latter from stalling on obtaining funding to comply with the law. He also said the EPA takes so long to approve a remedy for pollution that people living near the cleanup sites are neglected in the meantime.

“We’ve gotten bogged down in making the perfect the enemy of the good,” Fox said. “And the good is for the remedy to be protective.”

And though the hearing did conclude in a “bipartisan agreement” that CERCLA must be improved, some Democratic members of the committee took swipes at the Trump administration’s mass firings within the EPA, as well as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s termination of EPA regional office leases. Such offices are responsible for handling Superfund cleanup for nearby sites, according to hearing witness J. Alfredo Gomez, director of the US Government Accountability Office, and less staff can mean more Superfund delays.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said those personnel cuts “will do immeasurable damage to American families,” and cautioned there soon won’t be EPA staff left to carry out CERCLA’s goals.

“If the Trump-Musk administration slash-and-burn approach continues,” he said, “it won’t matter what improvements we propose here today.”