The President’s Budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would reduce spending by $500 million from $7.8 billion in FY 2001 to $7.3 billion in FY 2002. In many areas, such as water grants for the Drinking Water State Revolving Funds and funding to cleanup contamination from leaking underground storage tanks, the budget fails to address significant unmet needs. Under this budget, fewer Superfund sites will be cleaned up and costs recovered by the EPA from responsible parties will decrease significantly. Especially hard hit will be the federal civil and criminal enforcement program which will lose 270 authorized enforcement personnel. As a result, 2,000 fewer inspections will be conducted to detect violations of our clean air, clean water, and hazardous waste laws. If, as expected, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks are added during the appropriations process without increasing overall spending, then EPA’s core programs will sustain further cuts.

Safe Drinking Water Act

(dollars in millions)

The President’s budget plan fails to meet the needs for safe drinking water across the country.

Public water systems must invest in infrastructure improvements to ensure that they can deliver safe drinking water to consumers. In February 2001, the EPA released the results of a comprehensive survey of our nation’s infrastructure needs. The key finding of the survey is that "$102.5 billion is needed now to ensure the continued provision of safe drinking water." This compares to the $823 million budgeted by the Bush Administration for the drinking water state revolving loan fund. Local governments, states, drinking water suppliers, and the EPA all agree that there is a tremendous resource gap – which will continue to grow – for drinking water infrastructure funding necessary to protect the public health. The Bush budget freezes this important program with no adjustment for inflation at a level that is more than $175 million less than the amount authorized by Congress.

Based on staff interviews, we believe the important standard setting activities for drinking water contaminants and source water protection activities of the Office of Drinking Water will be cut by $1.3 million. Further, the $4.5 million reduction in research and development funding for the Office of Safe Drinking Water includes approximately $1 million for arsenic research.

Leaking Underground Storage Tank Program

(dollars in millions)

The Bush budget will fail to meet the need to clean up brownfields that exist as abandoned gas stations and groundwater contaminated by MTBE and other releases from leaking underground storage tanks.

The Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) Trust Fund was created by Congress in 1986 and is financed by a 0.1 cent a gallon tax on motor fuels. The LUST Trust Fund was specifically created to address contamination from leaking underground storage tanks at gas stations and other facilities. These tanks are often the source of MTBE and petroleum contamination in groundwater and it is estimated that over 200,000 old gas stations are brownfield sites. The budget acknowledges that there is a "backlog of Underground Storage Tank sites with confirmed releases waiting to be addressed." Nationwide there are an estimated 160,000 releases with more confirmed each year.

Currently, there is a surplus of $1.57 billion in the Trust Fund which is expected to grow under the Bush budget to $1.98 billion at the end of FY 2002. Nevertheless, the Bush budget freezes funding for this program with no adjustments for inflation at the FY 2001 enacted level. This amount is less than five percent of the amount currently in the LUST Trust Fund. As a result, large numbers of brownfield sites and sites with groundwater contamination from MTBE and other petroleum products across the country will not be cleaned up.

Superfund

(dollars in millions)

For the past four years of the Clinton Administration, the Superfund program has completed all construction activities at an average of 85 sites per year. The Bush budget called this "dramatic progress." However, the Bush budget contemplates a slowdown in cleanups by projecting only 65 construction completions in FY 2002 – more than a 20 percent reduction. The President’s budget also cuts the number of EPA authorized cleanup personnel by 17. The budget submitted by President Bush for the Superfund program represents a reduction of $33 million from the budget submitted by President Clinton for FY 2001. Congress, however, by establishing the National Priorities List (NPL) intended that Superfund NPL sites should be a funding priority in order to expedite the cleanups of the most seriously contaminated sites.

The Bush budget documents indicate that EPA will also work to "pursue greater recovery of EPA’s cleanup costs." However, the same budget is eliminating the authorization for 63.5 Superfund civil enforcement personnel and projecting a reduction in cost recoveries from the responsible parties of over $50 million in FY 2002 from the $231 million that was recovered in the FY 2000. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has in recent years identified inadequate cost recovery from polluters as one of the major weaknesses of the program. The Bush budget ignores the GAO recommendations to the EPA to "replenish the trust fund by increasing to the maximum extent its recovery of costs from the parties responsible for cleaning up these sites." In January 2001, the GAO found that "by using a new method to calculate the costs that it incurs to operate the Superfund program, EPA should be able to recover more of the indirect costs from responsible parties in cases in which EPA initially pays for the cleanup."

Under the polluter-pays principle, Congress imposed taxes on industry, including the petroleum and chemical industries, to provide revenues to the Superfund Trust Fund to cleanup toxic waste sites. Each year since 1995, when the Republican-led Congress allowed the Superfund taxes to expire, President Clinton and the EPA sought to have the taxes reauthorized. However, President Bush’s budget "does not propose reauthorization of the Superfund taxes." Industry taxpayers have saved over $7 billion due to the expiration of the Superfund taxes, or approximately $4 million per day. Thus, the burden to fund cleanups is increasingly being shifted to the general public.

Enforcement Program

(Employee Work Years)

* Of the 223.5 total reduction in employee work years, 205.9 comes from enforcement, which includes five FTEs from Superfund criminal enforcement. The remaining approximate 17 work years are mainly from the environmental information office but are listed within the enforcement budget.

Overall, the Bush Administration’s budget slashes the authorization for enforcement personnel by 270 full-time equivalents (FTEs), or about eight percent of the total EPA enforcement staff from the FY 2001 enacted budget. The large majority of the work year reductions come from compliance monitoring, civil and criminal enforcement, and enforcement training. For example, 182 enforcement personnel will be cut from compliance monitoring and from civil enforcement.

Twenty-six million dollars will be cut from the EPA’s budget to support the reduction of 270 work years.

Significantly, under the Bush budget, the EPA is expected to do 2,000 fewer inspections to detect violations of clean air, clean water, hazardous waste, and safe drinking water laws. Further, the budget provides for a nine percent reduction in criminal investigations of those who willfully violate our environmental laws.

The Administration argues that funding in the amount of $25 million will be shifted to state enforcement programs, but there is no requirement that the states use increased federal resources for enforcement or report on their results. Also, the state grant program contemplated by the Administration currently is not authorized by law.

Clean Air Act/Air Toxics

(dollars in millions)

For hazardous air pollutants, such as mercury, dioxin, heavy metals, and many pesticides, the Bush budget cut is $1.3 million. This is the budget for the office that sets and revises the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) standards. The EPA is woefully behind its statutory deadlines for setting MACT standards. Similarly, the air toxics research budget is cut by $3.3 million.

The budget acknowledges that these pollutants cause "adverse effects to human health and the environment ... from even low level exposure ... from individual facilities, exposures to mixtures of pollutants found in urban settings, or exposure to pollutants emitted from distant sources that are transported through an atmosphere over regional, national, or even global airsheds. Slowing the efforts to set protective standards represents a callous disregard for the health of citizens exposed to these pollutants."

Prepared by the Democratic staff of the Committee on Energy and Commerce
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