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

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Let potentially responsible parties conduct Superfund five-year reviews

Not started

431 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Allow PRPs to perform the statutorily required five-year reviews of Superfund cleanups to free OLEM resources.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Superfund five-year reviews are still performed by EPA, and EPA says so on the page that describes them. Its five-year reviews page, updated 28 August 2026, states that reviews "can be performed by EPA or the lead agency for a site" and that "EPA retains responsibility for determining the protectiveness of the remedy" — the lead agency, not the potentially responsible party. OLEM's own implementation directive says the same: the Superfund Program Implementation Manual has EPA conducting statutory reviews and points to the 2001 Comprehensive Five-Year Review Guidance, OSWER 9355.7-03B-P, as the operative procedure, 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. The FY 2026 Congressional Justification says the Superfund Federal Facilities Program will itself "review 50 five-year review reports" in FY 2026. Nothing shifts the reviews to potentially responsible parties.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • One negative search covered the OLEM and Superfund asks on pp. 431-433.
  • A Federal Register API search for “five-year review” and Superfund, restricted to EPA from 2025-01-20, returned nothing.
  • EPA’s five-year-review page read 2026-09-06. Status unchanged. This is the one of the five OLEM asks that a public EPA page answers head-on, and the earlier search had not opened it: EPA’s Superfund five-year reviews page (updated 2026-08-28) says who may perform a review and who is answerable for the protectiveness determination, and neither is the potentially responsible party. The OLEM directive was read too — the Superfund Program Implementation Manual, https://semspub.epa.gov/src/document/HQ/100003577, 65 occurrences of “five-year review” across 17,042 lines, all describing EPA-conducted statutory reviews, PRP-lead cleanups under EPA oversight, and the 2001 comprehensive guidance. The manual is dated 18 December 2024 and so is pre-window; the pages carrying it forward are what is cited.
  • The negative therefore reaches EPA rulemaking, EPA’s published five-year-review policy and OLEM’s own implementation directive. It does not reach individual site settlements, which are not published as a class — a consent decree could in principle assign report-drafting to a PRP without changing any of the above, and EPA’s retained protectiveness determination is what would still leave the ask unmet.
  • The same reading of the Superfund Program Implementation Manual covers #1118, #1119, #1123 and #1124.
Action
transfer
Object
Superfund five-year reviews
ID
1127