Page 421

ADMINISTRATOR’S OFFICE AND REORGANIZATION RESPONSIBILITY

The Office of the Administrator (AO) is intended to provide executive and

logistical support for the EPA Administrator. Its stated purpose is to support

EPA leadership and activities. To implement policies that are consistent witha

conservative EPA, the agency will have to undergo a major reorganization. The

Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy position within the Administrator’s office should

be renamed the Deputy Chief of Staff for Regulatory Improvement. This position

would oversee a reorganization effort that includes the following actions:

Returning the environmental justice function to the AO, eliminating the stand-alone Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.

Returning the enforcement and compliance function to the media offices (air, water, land, and emergency management, etc.) and eliminating the stand-alone Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assistance, which has created a mismatch between standard-setting and implementation.

Using enforcement to ensure compliance, not to achieve extrastatutory objectives.

Developing a plan for relocating regional offices so that they are more accessible to the areas they serve and deliver cost savings to the American people.

Restructuring the Office of International and Tribal Affairs into the American Indian Environmental Office and returning the international liaison function to media offices where appropriate.

Eliminating the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education as a stand-alone entity and reabsorbing substantive elements into the Office of Public Affairs.

Relocating the Office of Children’s Health Protection and the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization from the AO and reabsorbing those functions within the media offices (air, water, land, and emergency management, etc.).

Reviewing the grants program to ensure that taxpayer funds go to

organizations focused on tangible environmental improvements free from political affiliation.

can result in more work on the ground in communities where Americans live and

work. OLEM can accomplish this goal by determining the scope of work based on

an actual reduction in exposure to chemicals as opposed to the elimination of theoretical potential exposures. To manage cleanups more effectively, OLEM should:

• Require training in project management for project managers (as opposed to all staff having a general science background).

• Adopt EPA’s Lean Management System (ELMS) across all OLEM programs.

• Delegate all CERCLA authority from the Administrator to the OLEM Assistant Administrator as opposed to a direct delegation to the Regional Administrators.

• Find opportunities to transfer work and funding to states and tribes.

New Policies

Superfund. To execute more efficient and effective cleanups, the following changes are needed in the Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation (OSRTD:

• Revise the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP) to modernize and streamline the cleanup process using lessons learned from the execution of the NCP over the past 40-plus years.

• Increase the use of CERCLA removal authority to execute short-term cleanups, which will provide clarity and finality for potentially responsible parties (PRPs) and return cleaned up land to communities more swiftly.

• Streamline the process for determining Applicable or Relevant and Appropriate Requirements based on commonalities across sites as opposed

to making such determinations on a site-by-site basis.

• Revise groundwater cleanup regulations and policies to reflect the challenges of omnipresent contaminants like PFAS.

• Revisit the designation of PFAS chemicals as “hazardous substances” under CERCLA.

• Allow PRPs to perform the statutorily required five-year reviews of Superfund cleanups to free OLEM resources.

— 431—-—

Expand and fully stand up the Office of Mountains, Deserts and Plains to support innovative approaches to the cleaning up of abandoned mines.

Develop and execute a 10-year cleanup plan to address lead at all existing cleanup sites that includes benchmarks and milestones that allow for congressional and public oversight of the schedule.

RCRA. To streamline waste management, the following changes are needed in the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery (ORCR):

Create an RCRA post-closure care permit that is tailored only to postclosure obligations.

Modify regulations that impede resource efficiency, recycling, and reuse by providing clearly that these materials are not waste. This can be done by promulgating a rule that provides an alternative pathway to hazardous waste regulation to allow the transport of material to legitimate recyclers or back to manufacturers to support the recycling and reuse of material.

Change the electronic manifest (e-manifest) regulations to a 100 percent electronic system and eliminate all paper manifests and manual filing and data input. This system should operate from a range of common handheld devices and could be expanded to accommodate solid waste and materials for reuse and recycling.

Reassign regulation and enforcement of air emission standards under the authority of RCRA Section 3004” to OAR and revise and modernize the regulations to comport and integrate with CAA rules.

Risk Management Program. If anew Risk Management Program (RMP) rule

is finalized by the Biden Administration, it should be revised to reflect the amend

ments finalized in 2019 to protect sensitive information.

Personnel

The following organizational changes could create resource efficiencies to focus

on the highest-value opportunities:

Eliminate or consolidate the regional laboratories and allow OLEM to use EPA, other government, or private labs based on expertise and cost.