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Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to participate in your review of the Superfund cleanup program and its associated trust fund, the Hazardous Substance Superfund. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is pleased to contribute to this timely effort to promote a productive dialogue about the hazardous waste cleanup effort, before the next Superfund reauthorization.

CBO's analysis leads me to the following observations:

• Although the Superfund program is more than 11 years old, in many ways it is still in its early stages. Barring major changes in policy, both the trust fund and the cleanup effort will grow and remain sizable for several decades.
  
  
• The trust fund collected $10.2 billion in its first 11 years. At the end of fiscal year 1991, the fund had a total balance of $4.0 billion and an unobligated balance of $0.6 billion. Dedicated taxes account for two-thirds of cumulative receipts, including $1.4 billion in 1991.
  
  
• Federal expenditures under Superfund started slowly and have escalated since the 1986 reauthorization. Obligations totaled $1.35 billion and outlays were $0.88 billion during the first five years of the program. By contrast, in fiscal year 1991 annual obligations amounted to $1.6 billion and outlays reached $1.4 billion. Cumulative obligations and outlays over the first 11 years totaled $8.8 billion and $6.2 billion, respectively.
  
  
• Many sites have entered the Superfund remedial process, but few have finished it. More than 1,200 sites have been placed on the National Priorities List, but the broadest definition of completions used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) includes only 80 sites. The majority are in the earlier stages of remedial investigation or design.
  
  
• Under the "enforcement-first" policy instituted by EPA in 1989, the share of remedial activities undertaken by private parties has grown sharply. Consequently, the trust fund has diminished in importance as a source of cleanup resources. Increased private resources have helped the number of remedial actions to grow almost 50 percent between 1989 and 1991.
  
  
• Although these changes have increased the number of sites at later stages of the process, individual sites are not getting cleaned up faster. In the first two and a half years under "enforcement first," the projected time to complete key stages in the process has grown by 18 to 24 months.
  
  
• Although EPA has increased its enforcement efforts, it has made only modest use of some settlement tools that the Congress provided in the 1986 reauthorization. Only 58 de minimis settlements, 14 mixed-funding agreements, and one nonbinding allocation of responsibility were reached or provided in the succeeding five years.

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