Toxic clean-up fund stalls

The Trump administration has built up the biggest backlog of unfunded toxic Superfund clean-up projects in at least 15 years, nearly triple the number that were stalled for lack of money in the Obama era, according to 2019 figures quietly released by the Environmental Protection Agency over the Christmas-New Year holidays. The accumulation of Superfund projects that are ready to go except for money comes as the Trump administration routinely proposes funding cuts for Superfund and for the EPA in general. The fourdecade-old Superfund programme is meant to tackle some of the most heavily contaminated sites in the US and Trump has declared it a priority even while seeking to shrink its budget.