Project 2025 Would Significantly Hamper EPA Efforts to Protect Communities from Contaminated Waste Sites
Hello! Thank you for tuning in to Environmental Protection News. Today’s post comes from James Woolford, the former Director of the Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation in EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management. Established in 1980, the Superfund program was intended to clean up the nation’s most contaminated land and respond to natural disasters and environmental emergencies, including oil spills. Currently, polluters (mainly the mining, electric, fossil fuel, and chemical manufacturing industries) are charged with picking up the tab of the cleanup; however, James writes that Project 2025 would instead put that bill in the hands of taxpayers. Keep reading to learn more about how Project 2025 would affect the Superfund program, your health, and your wallet. - Steven Fantes, EPN Public Affairs Manager
Project 2025 Would Significantly Hamper EPA Efforts to Protect Communities from Contaminated Waste Sites
By: James Woolford
Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s plan for a new administration, makes many recommendations that would seriously undermine the critical work of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect public health and the environment. It includes a day-one pause and reconsideration of major rules and regulations, halting grants to human health and advocacy groups, reassessing enforcement cases, reducing staff, re-evaluating how agencies assess risk, and the reduction or elimination of work and programs that protect our most vulnerable communities.
Project 2025 also makes specific policy and program recommendations that would have direct harmful effects on EPA offices and programs, including the Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM), where I spent the majority of my 34-year EPA career. I retired in 2020 as the Director of the Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation and witnessed first-hand the negative impacts the Trump administration’s policies had on OLEM and public health. I have a good sense of what Project 2025 would mean for the agency’s Superfund hazardous waste cleanup program and other land protection and restoration programs managed by OLEM.
The Trump administration created a Superfund Task Force to come up with new ideas to improve the program. That Task Force, however, generated few new ideas and largely re-packaged recommendations to improve program operations from prior administrations dating back to President Clinton. Consistent with the approach followed during the former Trump administration, Project 2025 recommends moving decision-making authority for high-cost cleanup projects from EPA regional offices and centralizing it at the political level in the administrator’s office. Looking back, the net effect of this change was not better decisions. Rather, it added extra layers of bureaucracy by creating new briefing requirements for senior officials and a need to get on the administrator’s incredibly busy calendar for concurrence before finally reaching decisions. Decisions were frequently delayed more than six months, postponing important cleanup work needed to protect the public. There was no value added, but the process did provide the opportunity for the polluters to access political-level officials to argue for lesser cleanups to save themselves money at the expense of protecting the public.
Project 2025’s recommendations only slightly improve this prior approach by recommending making the Assistant Administrator for OLEM the decision-maker rather than the EPA administrator. It would still create bottlenecks, adding time, increasing costs, and delaying decisions. Centralizing decision-making authority would also undercut EPA’s regional offices, which are closer to the problems and to affected states, tribes, and localities. For the cleanup programs delegated to states and not covered by Superfund law under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Conservation, and Liability Act, EPA regional offices have been supportively working with their non-federal partners for decades, contrary to the picture painted in Project 2025.
Another misguided Superfund recommendation of Project 2025 is to have the polluters (rather than EPA) conduct statutorily mandated reviews of ongoing cleanups that are required every five years to determine if cleanups are protecting public health and the environment. Ask yourself, do you really want the people who caused the pollution to determine whether their work continues to protect those who may have been harmed? Yes, the fox would be guarding the hen house.
Another very significant recommendation would diminish EPA’s efforts to better address the public health challenges posed by the PFAS “forever chemicals,” PFOA and PFOS. Without providing a rationale, the plan calls on the agency to revisit (presumably drop) the designation of PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances, which would, if enacted, protect fewer communities and likely move costs to taxpayers and the affected communities instead of having the polluters pay. It also calls for revisions of groundwater regulations, which are designed to protect one of the Nation’s most precious and vulnerable natural resources. No doubt, such actions would provide relief to polluters at the expense of public health protection. Similarly, Project 2025 recommends revising EPA’s approach to assessing and managing the risks of low-dose radiation exposures, which has been endorsed by the National Academies of Science for more than two decades. This would undo the protections afforded to individuals, families, and communities by increasing exposure to harmful levels of radiation.
Other suggestions in the plan to modify programs under the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act (RCRA) and other OLEM programs deserve scrutiny and should be assessed through the lens of whether they are really going to produce safer, healthier, thriving communities. My sense is they would not.
A “more conservative EPA” would not create a better environmental future. It would mortgage that future to benefit the regulated community and those responsible for polluting while not protecting public health, welfare, and the environment. Plus, it would transfer the costs of cleanups and the costs of exposure to more pollution to taxpayers. Project 2025 will not make the air, water and soil cleaner or our environment healthier.
About James Woolford: Jim Woolford is the former Director of the Office Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation (OSRTI) in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management. As Director of OSRTI, he set national policy direction for the Superfund remedial/long-term cleanup program. He routinely and successfully worked with states, tribes, affected communities and potentially responsible parties (PRPs) on complex cleanups and redevelopment projects at more than 1,200 National Priorities List (NPL) sites. Since his retirement, Jim has volunteered for the Environmental Protection Network (EPN) and was a co-author on the Superfund chapter of EPN’s Resetting the Course of EPA document. He is also one of the principal volunteers for EPN’s technical assistance work, which supports communities affected by Superfund sites.
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