The Superfund program has lost 65% of its purchasing power since 1999 while the remaining 1,340 sites on the NPL grow more complex and expensive to clean up

Annual appropriations to the EPA's Superfund program declined from approximately $2.6 billion in fiscal year 1999 to $537 million in fiscal year 2024 — a 79% nominal cut and roughly 65% in inflation-adjusted terms. During that same period, the sites remaining on the National Priorities List became harder and costlier to remediate because the simpler, cheaper sites were cleaned up first. As of March 2025, 1,340 active sites remain on the NPL, with 41 more proposed for listing. Only 459 sites have been deleted (fully cleaned up) since the program began in 1980. The Superfund excise tax on chemical and petroleum companies that originally funded the program expired in 1995 and was not reinstated until 2022. When it came back, revenue fell far short of projections: EPA expected $1.7 billion in chemical tax receipts for fiscal 2024 but collected only $472.8 million — less than a third of the estimate. The trust fund's unobligated balance sits at roughly $5.5 billion, but that money is not being spent at the rate needed. Communities living near these sites — disproportionately low-income and communities of color — continue to drink contaminated water, breathe contaminated air, and suffer elevated rates of cancer, neurological disease, and reproductive harm while waiting decades for cleanup that may never come. This problem persists because Superfund has a structural design flaw: it depends on either (a) identifying a 'potentially responsible party' who can be forced to pay, or (b) federal appropriations from Congress. For 'orphan sites' where no responsible party exists or is solvent, the program relies entirely on Congressional funding, which has been in secular decline for 25 years. The 2025 GAO report (GAO-25-108408) confirmed that staffing shortages at EPA regional offices and state environmental agencies are a compounding factor — even when money is available, there are not enough people to manage the cleanup projects. The Trump administration's 2025-2026 workforce reduction, which cut approximately one-third of EPA staff (over 4,000 employees, many with 30+ years of institutional knowledge), has further degraded the agency's capacity to manage existing sites, let alone take on new ones.