Delegate CERCLA authority to the OLEM Assistant Administrator

Research notes

• One negative search covered the whole cluster of OLEM and Superfund asks on pp. 431-433.
• Reviewed 2026-09-06; EPA’s Delegations Manual could not be found. Status unchanged. None of these addresses exists: epa.gov/irmpoli8/epa-delegations-manual, epa.gov/irmpoli8/delegations-manual, epa.gov/laws-regulations/epas-delegations-manual, epa.gov/ogc/epa-delegations-manual, epa.gov/aboutepa/epa-delegations-manual, epa.gov/home/epa-delegations-manual, epa.gov/laws-regulations/delegations-authority, epa.gov/aboutepa/delegations-authority, epa.gov/ogc/delegations-authority. The parent page, epa.gov/irmpoli8, opens and is now “Office of Finance and Administration Policies”.
• EPA’s site search cannot be used for a negative, tested 2026-09-06. A search for “delegations manual” and a search for a nonsense string return byte-for-byte the same page (12,097 bytes). The page is a JavaScript shell that discards the query, so no negative may be taken from it.
• Among the Federal Register documents we keep and search, seventeen EPA documents since 2025-01-20 have “delegat” in the title, every one a state or local Clean Air Act delegation (Oklahoma, Louisiana, West Virginia, Allegheny County, North Carolina and Forsyth County, Ohio, Missouri, Washington, Louisville Metro). None is an internal EPA delegation of authority.
• Lead, not Evidence (pre-window, so it cannot be Evidence): the one individual EPA delegation document reachable on epa.gov is CERCLA Delegation 14-21-A, Consultations, Determinations, Reviews, and Selection of Remedial Actions at Federal Facilities, at epa.gov/fedfac/request-finalize-revisions-cercla-delegation-authority-14-21-consultations-reviews-and, revised in 2001. It shows the shape the Quote is asking about — that CERCLA authority is delegated in named slices to the OLEM Assistant Administrator and the Regional Administrators together, which is the arrangement the Mandate wants ended — but it is twenty-four years old and evidences nothing about this window.
• Worth noting for contrast, because it is what a published version would look like: DOE publishes exactly this instrument, at energy.gov/management/directives-guidance-and-delegations, with a searchable Delegations Library and a Delegations Flowdown. EPA does not.
• One instrument, three asks: this is the same document search as #1162 (retraction of science and risk-assessment delegations) and #1189 (authority to assert EPA legal positions to Congress). Neither can be settled from it either.