Jim Woolford & Dana Stalcup: EPA cleans up its cleanup act

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program for cleaning up severely polluted lands has been around since 1980. But in recent years, it’s had a very hard time keeping up. There are now more than 1,300 polluted sites on the agency’s National Priorities List, and in all of last year, only two sites were sufficiently cleaned up to be removed from the list. Scott Pruitt, the new EPA administrator, says that’s unacceptable, so he put a new commission in charge of accelerating the cleanup process. The panel came up with 42 recommendations, 11 of which Pruitt has ordered the agency to implement right away. Jim Woolford the director of EPA’s office of superfund remediation and technology innovation, and Dana Stalcup, the office’s deputy director, joins Federal Drive with Tom Temin to explain what’s changing.

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