Superfund backlog grows under Trump
A lack of funding has created the longest waiting list of toxic cleanup projects in years, the EPA says.
The accumulation of Superfund projects that are ready to go except for money comes as the Trump administration routinely proposes cuts for Superfund and for the EPA in general. The four-decade-old program is meant to tackle some of the most contaminated sites in the U.S., and President Trump has declared it a priority even while seeking to shrink its budget.
“There hasn’t been a sense of urgency,” said Violet Donoghue, who has lived for 31 years on Bon Brae Street in St. Clair Shores, Mich. PCBs have poisoned some local soil, water and fish at nearby Lake St. Clair, and the neighborhood is one of the 34 Superfund sites where cleanup projects languished for lack of money in 2019.
“I feel many people have been harmed,” Donoghue said. She said the last she heard from the EPA was that contaminated soil would be removed from in front of her house. “Now when they say they’re cleaning it, I say, ‘OK, give me the date,’ ” she said.
The unfunded projects are in 17 states and Puerto Rico. Locations include abandoned mines that discharged heavy metals and arsenic in the West, an old wood pulp site in Mississippi and a defunct dry cleaner that released toxic solvents in North Carolina.
Congress created the Superfund program in 1980 after toxic waste dumped at a landfill in Love Canal, N.Y., sickened hundreds, and other notorious pollution cases. Its intent is to hold polluters responsible for cleanup costs or provide taxpayer money when no responsible party is identified.
Trump “is focused on putting Americans first,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told a Senate environment panel in early 2019. “There may be no better example than our success in the Superfund program.
“We are in the process of cleaning up some of the nation’s largest, most complex sites and returning them to productive use,” he said.
Two former EPA officials whose work dealt with Superfund oversight said the growing backlog of stalled projects, and steady or ebbing numbers of cleanup construction projects completed, paint a different picture.
“They’re misleading Congress and the public about the funds that are needed to really protect the public from exposure to the toxic chemicals,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who worked for 30 years at the EPA, including as director of science and technology in the water office, before retiring in 2017. “It’s detrimental.”
This is a “regulatory failure,” said Judith Enck, the northeastern U.S. EPA chief under President Obama.
Given the growing number of unfunded cleanup projects, the EPA “should be knocking on the door of Congress and saying, ‘Give us more money to deal with the sites,’ ” Enck said.
Asked what the EPA spent money on instead and why it didn’t ask Congress for more to deal with the backlog, EPA spokeswoman Maggie Sauerhage offered few specifics.
The Superfund program “will continue to prioritize new construction projects based on which sites present the greatest risk to human health and the environment,” she said Thursday in an email. “Further, the agency maintains the authority to respond to and fund emergencies at these sites if there is an imminent threat to human health and the environment.”
She pointed to areas where Trump’s Superfund effort was more on par with that of his predecessors. Long-term remedial efforts to make sure contamination didn’t rebound at existing Superfund sites, for example, averaged 64 a year under Trump, compared with an average of 60 a year in Obama’s last five years.
But the backlog of 34 projects is up from only 12 in 2016, Obama’s last year.
At the site of another unfunded project, Montana’s Upper Tenmile mining region, which includes the community of Rimini and a subdivision downstream, the EPA has been providing bottled water to residents for the last decade because local water supplies have been polluted by about 150 abandoned gold, lead and copper mines.
Pollution still flows from the mines into Upper Tenmile Creek more than 20 years after the area was added to the Superfund list.
About six miles from Rimini in the rural Landmark subdivision is a huge pile of contaminated soil that was removed from residential yards. It was supposed to be hauled away but now has weeds growing over it after sitting untouched for several years, said Patrick Keim, who lives nearby.
“It’s a sword of Damocles hanging over us,” Keim said. “It just seems counterproductive they would spend two or three million dollars remediating this piece of property, haul it off and stockpile it across the road and then run out of money and leave this big pile.”
Montana regulators also are involved in the cleanup but say they need the EPA’s help for the work to resume, since the federal agency is to provide 90% of funding.
Under Trump, the EPA has pointed to a different yardstick in declaring it had made progress on cleanups — the number of cleaned sites officially deleted from the roster of over 1,300.
In 2019, for instance, the EPA said it had deleted all or part of 27 sites from the Superfund list, saying that was the most deletions since the George W. Bush administration. But deletions typically reflect cleanup work done over decades and often completed years ago, meaning Trump is sometimes taking credit for work done under his predecessors.
In 2018, the EPA cited the seven Superfund sites fully or partially removed from the list in the previous year as a signature Trump administration accomplishment. Records showed the physical work was completed before he took office, the Associated Press reported at the time.
Sauerhage, the EPA spokeswoman, didn’t respond directly to questions about the backlog of 34 unfunded projects. The EPA posted the total on its website without fanfare Dec. 26. Some of the projects that are ready to start have been idle for lack of money since Trump’s first year in office.
The EPA has been a focus of Trump’s efforts to cut regulations and oversight that he sees as burdening businesses. Each year he has asked Congress for cuts of nearly one-third in EPA’s budget, with smaller cuts for Superfund. Congress has kept funding levels about even.
