How Legislation Is Administered Can Affect Cleanup Costs

Our August 1994 report on the impact of incorporating land use planning decisions into cleanup decision-making stated that incorporating more realistic land use assumptions into the selection process for a cleanup remedy under CERCLA could result in significant cost savings—from $200 million to $600 million annually, according to DOE’s Assistant Secretary for EM. DOE and EPA have recognized the potential impact of this duplication. DOE’s Large Carryover Balances Continue to Be an Issue

In addition to making the cleanup more cost effective, an additional way to provide funds for DOE’s cleanup is through the use of excess carryover balances of uncosted obligations and unobligated balances. As a result, DOE cannot be sure it has reduced its balances to the minimum needed to operate its programs. However, as of February 1996, evaluations had been done for 7,450 of the sites. DOD and the military services plan to spend 83 percent of their fiscal year 1996 cleanup funds on sites in the high relative risk category. DOD has identified goals, strategies, budget items, and measures of merit for three of its environmental quality pillars: pollution prevention, conservation, and compliance. The Agency found 17 projects valued at $3.2 million that did not qualify for environmental compliance funding.
Why GAO Did This Study

GAO discussed the Department of Energy's (DOE) and Department of Defense's (DOD) efforts to control the cost of environmental cleanup of their nuclear weapons facilities.

What GAO Found

GAO noted that: (1) if DOE incorporated more realistic land use assumptions into the selection process for cleanups, that could result in significant cost savings of $200 million to $600 million annually; (2) deactivation of surplus facilities, a shortened environmental restoration process, and privatization of some cleanup processes could also result in DOE savings; (3) DOE excess carryover balances of uncosted obligations and unobligated balances could be used to fund cleanup efforts and reduce its future budget requests; (4) DOD has evaluated about 70 percent of its 10,000 cleanup sites, but it has not ranked over half of the sites based on relative risk or ranked sites based on geographical or organizational boundaries; and (5) DOD does not have sufficient data to manage its environmental compliance programs.