On Tuesday, EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi stood at a podium and announced the Superfund Solutions initiative, a long-term program to accelerate cleanups at more than 1,340 sites on the National Priorities List. The stated goals: cut red tape, expedite investigations at 500-plus sites, streamline contracting, deploy tools earlier, and get shovels in the ground faster.
The numbers behind the announcement are real. Since January 2025, the EPA reports completing more than 290 cleanups, recovering $864 million from responsible parties, and remediating over 59 million cubic yards of contaminated soil and water. At the West Lake Landfill in Missouri — a radioactive waste site that has haunted the St. Louis region for decades — the agency cut two years off the cleanup timeline. At the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky, interagency collaboration reduced a property transfer that typically takes years to under four months, unlocking a $1.5 billion private investment.
These are not trivial accomplishments. Communities near Superfund sites have waited decades for action, and any measurable acceleration deserves acknowledgment.
The Other Side of the Ledger
But cleanup speed is only half the equation. The other half — prevention — is moving in the opposite direction.
The EPA's May 2025 announcement that it would rescind drinking water standards for PFHxS, PFNA, GenX (HFPO-DA), and PFAS mixtures containing PFBS remains the defining regulatory action of the year. The agency kept the maximum contaminant levels for PFOA and PFOS at 4 parts per trillion but proposed extending the compliance deadline from 2029 to 2031. For the other four compounds, the message was blunter: the regulations are being withdrawn entirely while EPA reconsiders whether the Safe Drinking Water Act's legal process was properly followed.
The public comment period on that rescission is open now, with a deadline in mid-July. If you care about what comes out of your tap, this is the window that matters.
Faster Cleanup, Slower Prevention
Here is the tension that environmental professionals are watching: you cannot clean your way out of a contamination problem while simultaneously loosening the standards that define what contamination means.
Superfund is a remediation program. It deals with legacy sites — places where the damage is already done and the question is how quickly we can undo it. Drinking water standards are a prevention program. They set the floor for what is acceptable in the water Americans drink today, and they create the regulatory signal that forces polluters to change their behavior upstream.
When you accelerate the first while weakening the second, you are running faster on a treadmill. The cleanup numbers look better. The underlying contamination problem does not improve.
Consider this: the EPA's own data shows that roughly 16,000 PFAS compounds exist. The drinking water rule that was finalized in April 2024 covered six of them. The rescission would reduce that to two. Meanwhile, PFAS has been detected in virtually every recent rainwater sample tested and in an estimated 99.7 percent of American blood samples. The scope of contamination dwarfs the scope of regulation by orders of magnitude.
States Are Not Waiting
While the federal picture is mixed, the state-level response continues to accelerate. According to Safer States, at least 15 major state laws and regulations targeting toxic chemicals took effect in 2026, protecting more than 62 million Americans. Nine of those 15 directly target PFAS. Across 33 states, more than 275 bills addressing toxic chemicals and plastics are currently under consideration.
The specifics matter. California's A.B. 794 would allow the state water board to enforce the drinking water protections that were in place as of January 19, 2025 — the day before the current administration took office — regardless of subsequent federal rollbacks. Connecticut's S.B. 733 would create a 20 parts-per-trillion maximum contaminant level and require treatment when systems exceed it. Pennsylvania's H.B. 578 would set a 10 parts-per-trillion floor, regardless of future EPA action.
These are not blue-state outliers. Nearly 350 state legislators from both parties have signed letters urging Congress not to weaken the Toxic Substances Control Act or strip states of their authority to set stronger standards. Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota have moved to class-based bans — restricting entire families of PFAS in consumer products rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual compounds.
The Paducah Model
One detail from the Superfund Solutions announcement deserves closer attention. The Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant story — where EPA and the Department of Energy expedited a property transfer so that General Matter could invest $1.5 billion in nuclear materials reprocessing — is genuinely interesting. The project is expected to generate $70 million in annual economic benefit, create 140 jobs, transform a nuclear byproduct into usable material, and save taxpayers over $800 million in disposal costs.
That is the kind of contaminated-land reuse that makes economic and environmental sense. A legacy site that was a liability becomes a productive asset. The cleanup becomes an investment, not just an expense.
The question is whether this model can be applied more broadly — not just to sites with billion-dollar private partners, but to the hundreds of smaller Superfund sites where the responsible party is long gone or insolvent, and the cleanup depends on federal appropriations that Congress has been cutting.
The House spending bill that passed subcommittee last month would reduce the Clean Water State Revolving Fund by 27 percent and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund by 19 percent for fiscal year 2027. About half the remaining appropriation would go to earmarks rather than the revolving funds that serve communities nationwide. You cannot streamline your way past a funding shortfall.
Where We Stand
EPR Foundation supports faster Superfund cleanups. Full stop. Communities near contaminated sites have waited long enough, and any initiative that moves investigation to remediation faster is welcome.
But we also believe that cleanup without prevention is an expensive illusion. Enforceable drinking water standards for PFAS compounds beyond PFOA and PFOS are not bureaucratic overreach — they are the minimum floor of public health protection. Extending compliance deadlines to 2031 while rescinding standards for GenX and other emerging contaminants sends the wrong signal to polluters and the wrong message to communities.
The Superfund Solutions initiative and the PFAS drinking water rollback are not separate stories. They are two chapters of the same story. One says we are serious about fixing the past. The other says we are less serious about preventing the future.
We need both chapters to point in the same direction.
The public comment period on the PFAS drinking water rescission is open through mid-July. Submit comments at regulations.gov. If your state is considering PFAS legislation, contact your state legislators and tell them the floor matters.