Trump’s EPA Turns to New Tools for Faster Superfund Cleanups

A history of delays in cleaning up hazardous waste sites across the country is driving the Trump administration to find new ways to act faster, according to the EPA’s second-highest-ranking official.

“Addressing these sites cannot be a years-long effort before we even dig a shovel into the dirt,” David Fotouhi, deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview. “That’s what we’re really focused on.”

Stakeholders on all sides agree on the importance of cleaning up Superfund sites as fast as possible to shield local residents from toxins and return the land to productive use. But projects often get bogged down in legal disputes, sometimes blocking action for decades.

One approach President Donald Trump’s EPA is working on is deploying more presumptive remedies—cleanup plans at sites with well-known characteristics, such as former dry cleaners, Fotouhi said. In many cases, the EPA has enough experience about the typical problems at such sites that it can leap into action quickly.

The EPA has long sought to increase the use of presumptive remedies, but hasn’t always delivered on those plans. Now, the tool is getting “focused attention,” Fotouhi said. As an example, he cited the EPA’s recent decision to add a former wood treatment facility in Eugene, Ore., to the national priorities list.

The agency is also exploring the broader use of removal actions—rapid responses to chemical releases that are meant to stabilize the situation quickly.

“Can we deploy that statutory tool at more places to at least get contaminants more under control, in a quicker time frame, before we go down the road of listing a site and developing a full remedial investigation, feasibility study, and then developing a remedy for that site?” Fotouhi asked.

The EPA will release a comprehensive plan in the fall to address programmatic and technical evaluation issues, he said.

The agency is further taking a harder look at getting more sites to the “construction complete” stage—a milestone in the life cycle of a site at which all the infrastructure needed for the cleanup, such as groundwater treatment systems, are built and installed, even if the site isn’t clean yet. The EPA wants to boost the number of construction completes across the nation, Fotouhi said.

Promising Results

Already the results appear promising. In the second Trump administration’s first three and a half months, the EPA cleaned up 701,803 cubic yards of contaminated soil and water and extracted $284.4 million from responsible parties, according to the agency. That compares to 64,124 cubic yards and $235.9 million in the same time period the previous year.

Some local activists say they’re already seeing changes in delays at sites that have long frustrated them.

The San Jacinto River Waste Pits site, on the outskirts of Houston, has been on the Superfund list since 2008, but the responsible parties have asked for 565 days of delays all told, which the EPA has granted, said Jackie Medcalf, founder of the Texas Health and Environment Alliance.

The agency still hasn’t approved a cleanup design. But Medcalf recently met with EPA headquarters staffers who have told her they “want to move this site to action, and it’s taken way too long.”

By contrast, previous administrations have taken what Medcalf called “the path of least resistance” with endless rounds of meetings, reviews, and talks.

Similarly, the West Lake Landfill site near St. Louis, Mo., is finally getting action after languishing on the national priority list since 1990, said Dawn Chapman, co-founder of Just Moms STL, a community group that’s trying to get the site cleaned up.

The EPA’s new plan is for a cleanup design to be finished by October and for groundbreaking to start in spring 2027, two years sooner than the previous target date of May 2029, said Karen Nickel, another Just Moms STL co-founder.

The move to accelerate West Lake may have been nudged along by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who recently hosted EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin at the site. But to Chapman, politics are irrelevant.

“For us, it never mattered who was going to come in and clean us up,” she said. “It could have been Mickey Mouse. We didn’t care, but we weren’t getting where we needed to be with the Obama or Biden administrations, and that’s a fact.”

Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator, noted it was the Biden administration that secured new funding for the Superfund program and restored its taxing authority in the 2022 infrastructure and climate laws.

By contrast, the Trump administration has cut EPA staff dramatically and wants to slash its budget by more than 50%.

But Fotouhi said the agency still has around 1,200 Superfund employees, and he doesn’t worry about budget cuts because the Superfund program has numerous funding sources. Notably, in the last fiscal year the program reaped some $1.25 billion from responsible parties through enforcement, he said.

Reasons for Delays

Walter Mugdan, former deputy head of EPA’s Region 2, agreed with Fotouhi’s position that “there are some sites—not all, but probably quite a number—where things go more slowly than they could.”

One reason Superfund cleanups take so long is that it takes time to do the science, Mugdan said.

Critically, when dozens of potentially responsible parties are involved at a site, “when you have billions of dollars at stake, even a tiny difference about whether you’re 1% or 2% liable can be tens of millions of dollars,” he said. “So it makes it worth your while to argue and fight about everything. And the only way to resolve these arguments is to gather more data.”

Fotouhi acknowledged those concerns, but also said there are risks in moving too slowly.

“Taking action is vital to control the spread of contamination that could result in a bigger problem,” he said. “That’s something that we’re trying to change—the mindset of leaving things as they are while you decide what the best approach is.”