Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Increase use of CERCLA removal authority for short-term cleanups

Not started

431 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Increase the use of CERCLA removal authority to execute short-term cleanups, which will provide clarity and finality for potentially responsible parties (PRPs) and return cleaned up land to communities more swiftly.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No policy expanding the use of CERCLA removal authority for short-term cleanups was found, and the directive that would carry one is unchanged. OLEM's Superfund Program Implementation Manual sets the removal program's measures and procedures — removal completions, the three categories of emergency, time-critical and non-time-critical action, and the targets HQ and the regions agree each year — and the version EPA offers as current, on a page updated 3 June 2026, is still FY 2025, signed in December 2024 and so before the window. Nothing reweights the program toward removal authority in it or after it. The FY 2026 Congressional Justification describes the Emergency Response and Removal Program as under strain from wildfires and hurricanes and focused on "increasing efficiency"; it announces no shift from remedial to removal authority, and the Federal Register carries nothing on removal-authority policy.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • One negative search covered the whole cluster of OLEM and Superfund asks on pp. 431-433.
  • Federal Register API: a search for “removal action”, CERCLA and “streamlin” in EPA documents from 2025-01-20 returned none.
  • Reviewed 2026-09-06. Status unchanged. The OLEM directive that was the open lead is the Superfund Program Implementation Manual, found at epa.gov/superfund/superfund-program-implementation-manual and served from semspub.epa.gov/src/document/HQ/100003577; we read all 17,042 lines. “Removal action” appears 70 times, all descriptive of the existing program — its performance measure, its three action categories, and the annual target-setting between headquarters and the regions. Nothing directs greater use of the authority. The manual is dated 18 December 2024 and so is pre-window; the page still offering it as current is what carries the negative.
  • The negative reaches EPA rulemaking, EPA’s budget justification and OLEM’s own program-implementation directive. It does not reach unpublished regional practice — whether removal authority is in fact being used more often at particular sites is a question about caseload, which no published document in this window answers.
  • The same reading of the manual served #1118, #1119, #1124 and #1127.
Action
expand
Object
CERCLA removal authority
ID
1123