DOE is responsible for a nationwide complex of facilities created during World War II and the Cold War to research, produce, and test nuclear weapons. Much of the complex is no longer in productive use, but it contains vast quantities of radioactive waste related to the production of nuclear material, such as plutonium-contaminated sludge, and hazardous waste, such as solvents and hazardous chemicals. Since the 1980s, DOE has been planning and carrying out activities around the complex to clean up, contain, safely store, and dispose of these materials. It is a daunting challenge, involving the development of complicated technologies and costing about $220 billion over 70 years or more. DOE has reported completing its cleanup work at 74 of the 114 sites in the complex, but those were small and the least difficult to deal with. The sites remaining to be cleaned up present enormous challenges to DOE. DOE’s cleanup program is carried out primarily under two environmental laws. Under section 120 of CERCLA, EPA must, where appropriate, evaluate hazardous waste sites at DOE’s facilities to determine whether the waste sites qualify for inclusion on the National Priorities List, EPA’s list of the nation’s most serious hazardous waste sites. For each facility listed on the National Priorities List, section 120(e) (2) of CERCLA requires DOE to enter into an interagency agreement with EPA for the completion of all necessary remedial actions at the facility. These agreements often include the affected states as parties to the agreements. These agreements may be known as Federal Facility Agreements or Tri- Party Agreements. Under amendments to RCRA contained in section 105 of the Federal Facility Compliance Act of 1992, DOE generally must develop site treatment plans for its mixed-waste sites. These plans are submitted for approval to states authorized by EPA to perform regulatory responsibilities for RCRA within their borders or to EPA if the state does not have the required authority. Upon approval of the treatment plans, the state or EPA must issue an order requiring compliance with the approved plan. The agreements are generally known as Federal Facility Compliance orders. DOE carries out its cleanup program through the Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management and in consultation with a variety of stakeholders. These include the federal EPA and state environmental agencies, county and local governmental agencies, citizen groups, advisory groups, Native American tribes, and other organizations. In most cases, DOE’s regulators are parties to the compliance agreements. Other stakeholders advocate their views through various public involvement processes including site-specific advisory boards. Compliance agreements in effect at DOE sites can be grouped into three main types (see table 1). Agreements of the first type—those specifically required by CERCLA or by RCRA—are in effect at all of DOE’s major sites. They tend to cover a relatively large number of cleanup activities and have the majority of schedule milestones that DOE must meet. By contrast, agreements that implement court-ordered settlements exist at only a few DOE sites, tend to be focused on a specific issue or concern, and have fewer associated schedule milestones. These agreements are typically between DOE and states. The remaining agreements are based on either federal or state environmental laws and address a variety of purposes, such as cleaning up spills of hazardous waste or remediating groundwater contamination, and have a wide-ranging number of milestones. Most of the milestones DOE must meet are contained in the compliance agreements at its six largest sites—Hanford, Savannah River, Idaho Falls, Rocky Flats, Oak Ridge, and Fernald. These six DOE sites are important because they receive about two-thirds of DOE’s cleanup funding. In all, these sites account for 40 of the agreements and more than 4,200 milestones. DOE reported completing about two-thirds of the 7,186 milestones contained in its compliance agreements as of December 2001. Of the 4,558 milestones completed, about 80 percent were finished by the original due date for the milestone. The remainder of the completed milestones were finished either after the original due date had passed or on a renegotiated due date, but DOE reported that the regulators considered the milestones to be met. DOE’s six largest sites reported completing a total of 2,901 of their 4,262 milestones and met the original completion date for the milestones an average of 79 percent of the time. As table 2 shows, this percentage varied from a high of 95 percent at Rocky Flats to a low of 47 percent at Savannah River. Besides the 1,334 milestones currently yet to be completed, additional milestones will be added in the future. Although DOE has completed many of the milestones on time, for several reasons DOE’s success in completing milestones on time is not a good measure of progress in cleaning up the weapons complex. Specifically: Many of the milestones do not indicate what cleanup work has been accomplished. For example, many milestones require completing an administrative requirement that may not indicate what, if any, actual cleanup work was performed. At DOE’s six largest sites, DOE officials reported that about 73 percent of the 2,901 schedule milestones completed were tied to administrative requirements, such as obtaining a permit or submitting a report. Some agreements do not have a fixed number of milestones, and additional milestones are added over time as the scope of work is more fully defined. For example, one of Idaho Falls’ compliance agreements establishes milestones for remedial activities after a record of decisionhas been signed for a given work area. Four records of decision associated with the agreement have not yet been approved. Their approval will increase the number of enforceable milestones required under that agreement. Many of the remaining milestones are tied to DOE’s most expensive and challenging cleanup work, much of which still lies ahead. Approximately two-thirds of the estimated $220 billion cost of cleaning up DOE sites will be incurred after 2006. DOE has reported that the remaining cleanup activities present enormous technical and management challenges, and considerable uncertainties exist over the final cost and time frame for completing the cleanup. Even though schedule milestones are of questionable value as a measure of cleanup progress, the milestones do help regulators track DOE’s activities. Regulators at the four sites we visited said that the compliance agreements they oversee and the milestones associated with those agreements provide a way to bring DOE into compliance with existing environmental laws and regulations. They said the agreements also help to integrate the requirements under various federal laws and allow regulators to track annual progress against DOE’s milestone commitments. Regulators have generally been flexible in agreeing with DOE to change milestone dates when the original milestone could not be met. DOE received approval to change milestone deadlines in over 93 percent of the 1,413 requests made to regulators. Only 3 percent of DOE’s requests were denied. Regulators at the four sites we visited told us they prefer to be flexible with DOE on accomplishing an agreement’s cleanup goals. For example, they generally expressed willingness to work with DOE to extend milestone deadlines when a problem arises due to technology limitations or engineering problems. Because regulators have been so willing to adjust milestones, DOE officials reported missing a total of only 48 milestones, or about 1 percent of milestones that have been completed. Even in those few instances where DOE missed milestone deadlines and regulators were unwilling to negotiate revised dates, regulators have infrequently applied penalties available under the compliance agreements. DOE reported that regulators have taken enforcement actions only 13 times since 1988 when DOE failed to meet milestone deadlines. These enforcement actions resulted in DOE paying about $1.8 million in monetary penalties, as shown in table 3. In addition to or instead of regulators assessing monetary penalties, several DOE sites agreed to other arrangements valued at about $4 million. For example, for missing a milestone to open a transuranic waste storage facility at the Rocky Flats site, the site agreed to provide a $40,000 grant to a local emergency planning committee to support a chemical-safety-in- schools program. At the Oak Ridge site, because of delays in operating a mixed waste incinerator, site officials agreed to move up the completion date for $1.4 million worth of cleanup work already scheduled. Also, at three sites—Paducah, Kentucky; Lawrence Livermore Main Site, California; and Nevada Test Site, Nevada—the regulators either did not impose penalties for missed milestones or the issue was still under discussion with DOE at the time of our review. The President’s budget submitted to the Congress does not provide information on the amount of funding requested for DOE’s compliance requirements. DOE sites prepare budget estimates that include compliance cost estimates and submit them for consideration by DOE headquarters. However, DOE headquarters officials evaluate individual site estimates and combine them into an overall DOE-wide budget, taking into account broader considerations and other priorities that it must address as part of the give-and-take of the budget process. As a result, the final budget sent to the Congress has summary information on DOE’s programs and activities, but it provides no information on the portion of the budget needed to fund compliance requirements. DOE is not required to develop or present this information to the Congress. The President’s budget typically states that the DOE funding requested is sufficient to substantially comply with compliance agreements, but it does not develop or disclose the total amount of funding needed for compliance. Officials at DOE headquarters told us that budget guidance from the Office of Management and Budget does not require DOE to develop or present information on the cost of meeting compliance requirements, and they said doing so for the thousands of milestones DOE must meet would be unnecessarily burdensome. They said their approach has been to allocate funds appropriated by the Congress and make it the sites’ responsibility to use the funds in a way that meets the compliance agreement milestones established at the site level.