Administration exempt military land from major environmental requirements

[mrbowler]

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Pollution cleanups pit Pentagon against regulators:

"About one in 10 Americans — nearly 29 million — live within 10 miles of a military site that is listed as a national priority for hazardous-waste cleanup under the federal Superfund program, a USA TODAY analysis shows. In all, the Defense Department is responsible for more than 10% of the 1,240 total sites listed for priority cleanup under the program, which aims to restore the nation's most polluted properties, both public and private."

"Since 2001, Pentagon officials have stalled cleanups at scores of military sites where contamination from training and manufacturing has fouled soil and water. They've used their political clout to sidetrack new regulations that could force the services to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more to deal with pollution. And they've challenged state and federal regulators' power to make the military obey existing environmental laws."

Now the administration is pushing Congress to exempt millions of acres of military land from major environmental requirements. Four years after President Bush campaigned on a pledge to make the military "comply with environmental laws by which all of us must live," the White House is the Pentagon's chief ally in pushing for relief from such laws.

Within the administration, "it's no secret that the EPA is running into this wall with the Pentagon," says Linda Fisher, who served two years as Bush's deputy EPA administrator — the agency's second-in- command — before returning to private work last year.

"Is the Department of Defense taking (regulatory disputes) to the White House more often? Absolutely," says Fisher, who has held environmental jobs in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan's. "Is the Department of Defense more powerful than the EPA? Yes."

By law, it's up to health and environmental agencies to assess health risks on polluted property and direct any necessary cleanup. Those responsible for creating the pollution get relatively little say.

Congress, with support from both Republican and Democratic administrations, reinforced that notion repeatedly over the past two decades. It approved a series of measures to hold the armed services to the same environmental rules as private industry. The Pentagon responded with new efforts to control and clean up pollution, and now the military generally does as well as private industry in making current activities comply with environmental laws.