There was a Waste Management and Regulatory Oversight Subcommittee hearing held on 1st August, to discuss the future of Superfund, which is a program of Environmental Protection Agency. This meeting was held because of Superfund task force first report released insight of recommendations for the cleanup of sites. The Superfund task force was created by EPA administrator Scott Pruitt in May 2017.
As we can see until now, the fate of the program is facing many threats because of the budget cuts suggested by the EPA and Superfund program. The Superfund program will lose 30% budget if the budget proposed by Donald Trump gets approved. Many were expecting Trump’s proposed cut for EPA, but such deep cut from Superfund was unforeseen. There was a statement earlier, given by Pruitt which supported the Superfund program as he said, “he does not support cutting the Superfund program and instead promised to prioritize it”. He also said, “Unfortunately, many of these sites have been listed as Superfund sites for decades, some for as many as 30 years”. Pruitt also announced to Superfund Task Force in May “This is not acceptable. We can—and should—do better.”
Ranking committee member Sen.Kamala Harris (D-Calif) said in her opening remarks that Pruitt is setting unrealistic expectations for Superfund achievement ability with such small budget. “The rhetoric and the reality may not add up,” she said. “I would like to hear how the agency plans to accelerate the pace of cleanups while significantly cutting the sources of funding to do that clean-up.”
The hearing held on Tuesday, 1st August just focused on how the agency is going to address about 3,000 clean-up sites, let aside the proposed sites that the agency has yet to evaluate with all the stuff going around about cutting the budget of the agency. A policy consultant named Katherine Probst, who also worked for EPA previously says that the budget cuts and Pruitt’s plans don’t go along. “It’s hard to imagine you can do long-term cleanups with that kind of draconian cuts,” she told the committee. “Some have said that the responsibility to clean-up should move to the states. But few if any states have the resources to clean up a site of that federal clean-up magnitude.”
When the hearing was about to end, Probst warned the committee that some parts of the hearing wouldn’t suffer much loss but the actual loss would be “choking off the long-term cleanup program.” “There’s nothing in (the task force’s) report that says that but that’s a danger,” she said. “That’s what I would caution.” Sen. Jerry Moan took it a step further: “A vision without funding is a hallucination.”
Recycling e-waste is also important for the US right now, but there is still no talk about that while Trumps is cutting the budget of Superfund by millions.