Federal facilities have been contaminated with a wide range of substances, including highly radioactive waste and toxic chemicals. As of April 1995, federal agencies had placed 2,070 facilities on the federal facility docket, EPA’s listing of the facilities awaiting evaluation for possible cleanup. EPA had placed 154 federal facilities on the National Priorities List (NPL) (see table 1) and, as of February 1996, had proposed another five facilities for listing. (For the status of the 2,070 facilities on the docket, see app. I.) EPA uses the NPL as an aid in determining which sites warrant further investigation to assess public health and environmental risks and which sites merit cleanup. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980, as amended, created the Superfund program to govern cleanups of both private and federal hazardous waste sites. Cleanups of federal facilities are also subject to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, as amended, which governs, among other things, the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous wastes. This review focuses on the requirements that CERCLA imposes upon federal facilities. The Superfund process for cleaning up federal facilities consists of many steps involving both the responsible federal agencies and EPA. First, a responsible federal agency identifies a potentially contaminated facility and reports it to EPA for listing on the federal facilities docket. The responsible agency then conducts a preliminary assessment to gather data on the facility and performs a site inspection, which may involve taking and analyzing samples, to learn more about potential contamination. An EPA region oversees the agency’s activities at each stage, and if the evidence indicates that the facility is contaminated, EPA then decides when to evaluate the facility to determine whether it qualifies for inclusion on the NPL. The evaluation scores the severity of the facility’s contamination using EPA’s hazard ranking system. Figure 1 depicts the stages in the Superfund process leading to a facility’s placement on the NPL. After EPA has placed a facility on the NPL, the responsible federal agency is required, within 6 months, to begin a remedial investigation to characterize the waste and a feasibility study to evaluate the alternatives for cleaning up the facility. With EPA’s oversight, the agency examines all the information gathered during this process, selects a cleanup remedy, and prepares a record of decision to document the analysis that led to the selection. The responsible agency must also enter into an interagency agreement with EPA on a plan for cleaning up the facility. Finally, the responsible agency develops a detailed design and implements the cleanup plan while EPA oversees the agency’s implementation. Figure 2 depicts the cleanup stages in the Superfund process. Although several federal agencies have significant numbers of facilities on the federal facility docket (see table 1), the departments of Defense and Energy have the largest budgets for environmental restoration. In comparison, Interior’s cleanup program is currently small, but it is expected to grow as the Department’s agencies—including the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service—develop more complete inventories of contaminated facilities, particularly abandoned mines. For fiscal year 1996, the appropriations for hazardous waste cleanups at Defense, Energy, and Interior totaled almost $4 billion. (See table 2.) The Federal Facilities Policy Group estimates that the total cost of cleaning up federal facilities could reach almost $400 billion (see app. II). From the formal inception of federal environmental cleanup programs through fiscal year 1996, the group reported that federal agencies have budgeted nearly $54 billion for cleanups. According to the group, about two-thirds of the total budget has been targeted for Energy facilities and includes amounts for ongoing waste management. For the purposes of this report, we have defined a “site” as a specific area of contamination and a “facility” as a geographically contiguous area under an agency’s ownership or control within which a contaminated site or sites are located. EPA generally includes all contaminated sites at a federal facility—such as a military installation—on the NPL. Thus, a federal facility on the NPL may contain from a few to hundreds of sites that require assessment and possibly cleanup. It is generally agreed that the magnitude of the risks to human health posed by contamination at a federal facility should be a primary factor in setting priorities for cleanups. However, according to the Federal Facilities Environmental Restoration Dialogue Committee (a group composed of representatives from federal, state, local, and tribal governments, as well as citizens’ groups and labor organizations), additional factors also warrant consideration. These include legal requirements; cost-effectiveness; the potential future uses of decontaminated land; and other cultural, social, and economic factors. The Superfund process does not fully and consistently identify for possible cleanup the federal facilities presenting the greatest risks to public health and the environment. An incomplete inventory of contaminated federal facilities and a backlog of unevaluated facilities have limited the scope of priority-setting efforts. Furthermore, no national guidance ensures that EPA’s regions use a consistent approach in choosing which facilities to evaluate for inclusion on the NPL from the backlog of facilities awaiting this step. Some facilities that qualify for inclusion are not being listed, making listing an uncertain indicator of a facility’s relative risk. In addition, EPA’s evaluation process does not produce enough information to rank sites on the basis of relative risk. Agencies cannot fully set priorities without a complete inventory of contaminated sites and adequate data on the risks at these sites. As we have reported in the past, federal agencies have not yet completed a comprehensive inventory of their potentially contaminated sites. Some agencies, such as Defense and Energy, have made substantial progress toward completing their inventories, while others, such as Interior, are still in the early stages of developing theirs. As of April 1995, Interior had 432 sites on the federal facility docket, but a recent report by the Federal Facilities Policy Group estimates that Interior has 26,000 sites that may require some cleanup. The dimensions of Interior’s future cleanup responsibilities are uncertain. Interior officials estimate that only 1 or 2 percent of these sites may require major cleanup work. According to officials, the Department’s legal liability for cleaning up many sites has not been fully resolved. Interior officials told us that they are not planning to conduct a comprehensive inventory of their potentially contaminated hazardous waste sites, in part because they lack sufficient funding. Instead, they intend to rely on existing information, as well as on discoveries made during the Department’s regular activities, to identify sites requiring cleanup. In 1994, we reported on the importance of a comprehensive federal site inventory and recommended, among other things, that the Congress amend CERCLA to (1) require the agencies to submit plans for completing their inventories of hazardous waste sites for EPA’s review and approval and (2) require EPA to report annually to the Congress on the agencies’ progress toward completing the inventories. No action has yet been taken on these recommendations. For many of the facilities and sites in their inventories, federal agencies have not gathered sufficient data to set priorities for further activities. Information is incomplete for 1,040 of the 2,070 facilities listed on the federal facility docket. For some, the agency has not completed the preliminary assessment or site inspection; for others, the EPA region has not reviewed the responsible federal agency’s inspection or the site’s status is unknown. As table 3 shows, 157 facilities have completed the early assessment phases and are awaiting the final evaluation for inclusion on the NPL. At the current evaluation rate, this backlog could take many years to clear. According to EPA officials, the agency’s budget permits the agency to perform final evaluations for only five facilities per year. Despite the need for setting priorities to determine which sites in the backlog to evaluate first for possible inclusion on the NPL, EPA headquarters has not developed policy guidance to ensure that the regions employ a consistent approach. EPA has developed such guidance for evaluating nonfederal NPL candidate sites but has not extended its application to federal facilities. Only 4 of EPA’s 10 regions reported using such nonfederal guidance to help them determine which federal facilities to evaluate first for possible inclusion on the NPL. In July 1993, we reported that EPA was not evaluating federal facilities in a timely manner, in part because (1) it did not devote adequate resources to the task and (2) some agencies were providing EPA with late or incomplete data. Delays in EPA’s evaluation may postpone cleanups while responsible federal agencies await EPA’s decision on a facility’s NPL status or may cause rework after a facility has been listed. These delays could increase dangers to human health and the environment and raise costs. Our report recommended that EPA, in consultation with the regulated agencies, develop a plan to address the backlog of unevaluated federal facilities on the docket. Such a plan, which could be used to specify criteria for selecting the order in which facilities should be evaluated for cleanup, has not been developed. EPA officials are concerned that the agency would not have the resources to implement such a plan. EPA regional officials cited EPA’s limited resources and poor data from the responsible agencies as the main barriers to improving EPA’s ability to determine which sites to evaluate first. Many regions believed they did not have the staff resources or the funding needed to adequately oversee the agencies’ preliminary assessments and site inspections. In addition, 9 of EPA’s 10 regional offices cited inadequate data from other agencies on sites’ risks as a significant barrier to improving their own priority setting. EPA officials said that some federal agencies were slow to submit the results of their investigations, the data were sometimes incomplete when submitted, and EPA’s guidance on data gathering was not being followed. As a result, some seriously contaminated facilities are not yet ready for EPA’s evaluation. To improve the quality and timeliness of the data it receives from the regulated agencies, one EPA region reported making two significant changes.