EPA makes things worse EPA makes an already-deplorable situation even worse by its grossly inefficient administration of the Superfund program. There is massive duplication of work carried out by EPA employees in the agency's Washington headquarters and in its ten regional offices. It contributes nothing to the restoration of a contaminated site, but simply adds to the waste the program imposes on the rest of the country. Little bang for the buck All the sacrifices imposed by Superfund are being made for few, if any, public-health benefits. Because EPA has ignored an area of science known as chirality, its data on industrial chemicals are in many cases completely worthless, the study says.
Chiral chemicals have molecules that come in mirror-image twins.
How these molecules react when they encounter pollution-degrading microbes in the soil, determines whether they become harmful or benign. For nearly two decades, this science gap has allowed EPA to impose Superfund cleanup standards that are scientifically flawed and have contributed immeasurably to the cost of this misbegotten program. As awful as Superfund is, however, efforts to reform the program have gone nowhere. Superfund serves the narrow interests of some very powerful parties. Bonner R. Cohen is a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.