The Tax That Funds Tank Cleanups Hasn't Moved Since 1987

Every gas station in the country sits on a tank buried in the ground, and eventually, some of those tanks leak.▸ Congress built a system for this in 1986: a small tax on every gallon of motor fuel sold, feeding a federal trust fund to pay for cleanups when the tank owner can't or won't. Forty years later, that federal tax is still exactly what it was on day one — 0.1 cent a gallon, per the 1997 Congressional Research Service report that first documented the rate, never adjusted since. States, meanwhile, have quietly picked up the actual bill.

The LUST Trust Fund — Leaking Underground Storage Tank, an unfortunate but accurate acronym — took in "over $62 million" for the entire country in fiscal year 2026, more than 86% of it passed straight through to states, territories, and tribes to run their own cleanup and prevention programs.▸ That's the whole federal contribution for a year.

Compare that to what states have actually spent keeping the system functional.▸ Thirty-six states run their own UST financial assurance funds, and according to the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials' State Fund Survey, those funds have paid out roughly $20 billion since 2002 cleaning up leaking tanks — money raised through state fuel fees and industry assessments, not the federal tax at all.

Even stretched across 24 years, $20 billion averages out to roughly $833 million a year in state spending — more than thirteen times the entire federal appropriation, in a single one of those years.▸ The trust fund built to backstop this system doesn't backstop it. States do.

The federal program has been running since 1984.▸ It has confirmed 583,313 tank releases and closed out 530,454 of them. The remainder — every one a site where petroleum contamination has been found and not yet cleaned up — still runs 52,859 sites deep, per EPA's own mid-year FY2026 performance report.

In just the six months covered by that report, states confirmed 1,997 new releases and completed 2,947 cleanups — a net backlog reduction of 950 sites in half a year.▸ At that pace, and assuming no new leaks ever surface again, clearing the existing 52,859-site backlog would take on the order of 27 years. New leaks will surface. The backlog isn't closing; it's being managed down slightly faster than it refills.

The other side of this system is prevention: keeping tanks from leaking in the first place.▸ EPA's UST program conducted 38,326 on-site inspections nationwide in the six months ending March 2026, checking facilities against four federal safety standards — spill prevention, overfill prevention, corrosion protection, and release detection.

Corrosion protection is in decent shape — 90.7% compliant, the kind of number a system can live with.▸ Release detection, the equipment that actually catches a leak as it happens, clears only 71.5%. Put all four requirements together and just 60.9% of inspected tanks meet every standard at once — meaning four in ten tanks EPA's inspectors actually looked at, in the country that invented this regulatory system in 1984, fail at least one of the rules meant to keep the next 52,859-site backlog from happening.

All dollar figures are nominal, not inflation-adjusted. "Since 2002" state fund totals and "since 1984" federal cumulative totals are both as reported by their respective sources and are not directly comparable timeframes; each is labeled by its own window in the charts above. The 27-year backlog projection is this publication's calculation from EPA's six-month net cleanup rate, not a figure EPA itself publishes.