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

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Require project management training for OLEM cleanup project managers

Not started

431 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Require training in project management for project managers (as opposed to all staff having a general science background).”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No EPA training requirement for cleanup project managers is on any allowlisted source, and the OLEM directive that would carry one has not been reissued. The Superfund Program Implementation Manual — OLEM Directive 9200.3-158, the manual that sets program goals, planning requirements and implementation procedures for the offices that run Superfund — is the natural home for a project-manager training requirement, and the version EPA offers as current is still FY 2025, signed in December 2024 and therefore before the window. Its page was last updated 3 June 2026 and still offers no successor. The FY 2026 Congressional Justification and the FY 2026 CJ reorganization addendum describe OLEM's restructuring in detail and neither mentions project management training or a qualification requirement for project managers; nothing in the Federal Register in the window carries one.

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.
  • An OLEM project-manager training requirement would live in an internal OLEM directive, not in the Federal Register. The FY 2026 CJ addendum is the fullest public account of OLEM’s reorganization and it describes only office mergers and renamings.
  • Checked again 2026-09-06. Status unchanged. The open question was whether any OLEM directive or program guidance a person can reach says anything on this. EPA publishes one, and it is reachable: the Superfund Program Implementation Manual, linked from epa.gov/superfund/superfund-policy-guidance-and-laws → epa.gov/superfund/superfund-program-implementation-manual, with the PDF at https://semspub.epa.gov/src/document/HQ/100003577. It was downloaded and read (17.8 MB, 17,042 lines of text). Its PDF metadata gives the title “Superfund Program Implementation Manual (SPIM) - FY 2025, 9200.3-158” and the date 18 December 2024, so the manual in force predates the evidence window and cannot itself be Evidence; the page offering it as current on 2026-06-03 can, and is what is cited. The word “training” appears 19 times in the manual, none of them establishing a project-manager training requirement.
  • This is one directive answering five asks, and it answers all five the same way — nothing in the window changed it. The others are #1119, #1123, #1124 and #1127; one reading of the manual covers all five.
Action
create
Object
OLEM project manager training requirement
ID
1118