Congress cut Superfund's budget 47%. The polluter tax meant to replace it came up short too.

Superfund cleans up the country's most contaminated ground — 1,340 active sites on the National Priorities List as of March 2025, ninety percent of them not on federal land, per GAO.▸ For decades Congress paid for that with a mix of general tax dollars and a dedicated excise tax on the chemical and petroleum industries — "polluter pays." The excise tax lapsed in 1995 and stayed dead for 26 years. When it was reinstated in 2022, the idea was that it would eventually replace the general-fund appropriation. Fiscal 2026 is the year that bet was called, and the tax came up short of what EPA itself expected.

Superfund's congressional appropriation has been sliding since the tax first lapsed.▸ GAO's April 2025 testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee put it plainly: the program's annual appropriation fell "from about $2.6 billion in fiscal year 1999 to about $537 million in fiscal year 2024." Fiscal 2025 held roughly flat at $537.70 million. Then fiscal 2026 arrived: enacted appropriations for the Superfund account dropped to $282.8 million — a $255.0 million, 47.4% cut in a single year, per the Congressional Research Service.

The cut wasn't an accident of arithmetic — it was a policy choice.▸ For fiscal 2026, EPA did not request any annual appropriation at all for the Remedial program — the line that pays for actual site cleanup construction — planning instead to fund it entirely from Superfund excise tax receipts. Congress still appropriated money for the program's other pieces: $47.3 million for Emergency Response and Removal (itself down $11.9 million from FY2025), $21.6 million for Federal Facilities, and $7.7 million for EPA's own emergency preparedness. But the biggest single piece of the cleanup budget was handed to the tax.

The tax didn't deliver what EPA had penciled in.▸ Per the Congressional Research Service, the projected $1.60 billion collected in FY2025 from Superfund tax receipts "is approximately 26% less than the $2.17 billion EPA estimated to be collected." It isn't the first miss: EPA's FY2025 budget request had already reported that FY2024 tax collections came in around $1.20 billion — roughly half of the $2.50 billion the agency had projected a year earlier. A funding mechanism EPA is now betting an entire program project on has undershot its own forecast two years running.

Money aside, Superfund cleanups require staff — people who negotiate with polluters, manage remediation contracts, and sign off on whether a site is safe to delete from the priorities list.▸ That headcount was already shrinking before any of the 2026 budget fight. GAO reports that EPA's Superfund program had 2,859 full-time-equivalent positions in fiscal 2013 and 2,585 in fiscal 2023 — a decade-long decline of 274 positions, which GAO lists among the reasons cleanups have slowed and fewer sites get deleted from the list each year.

Then came a much bigger, agency-wide cut.▸ On July 18, 2025, EPA announced a reduction in force that took the agency from 16,155 employees in January 2025 to 12,448 — a drop of 3,707 people, which EPA said would save $748.8 million a year. The RIF was agency-wide, not aimed specifically at Superfund, but a program that was already down staff going into 2025 doesn't get to opt out of a cut that size.

Figures span multiple fiscal years and two different staffing scopes (Superfund-program-specific vs. EPA agency-wide); each chart and stat tile above notes which applies. Dollar figures are nominal, not inflation-adjusted.