During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to restore the Superfund to its previous strength by resurrecting a tax on the oil and chemical industries. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that a lack of funds has hampered its ability to conduct environmental cleanups around the country. In a June 2010 letter to Congress, the EPA took the unusual move of lobbying for the tax's reinstatement.

So how much progress has there been on Obama's Superfund promise?

First some background. Superfund is the nickname given to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980. This legislation empowered the EPA to force polluters to clean up toxic sites they had created. It also addressed the problem of "orphaned sites." These are polluted areas for which no responsible party can be found or which were created by a company that no longer exists. Such sites make up approximately half of the almost 1,300 toxic locations across the United States.   

The federal government financed cleanups of orphaned sites with the tax on the chemical and oil industries. Revenue from this tax went into a trust fund that the EPA could use to clean up the sites. Within five years of implementation, the tax had generated $1.6 billion. By 1996, the fund had more than doubled to $3.8 billion.

Congress allowed this tax to expire in 1995. By 2003, the Superfund's coffers were empty. As a result, orphaned site cleanups are now financed through taxpayer dollars. The loss of industry tax revenues led to a decline in performance. In 1999, for example, the EPA cleaned up 89 orphaned sites. By 2009, the number dropped to 19.

An attempt was made with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to breathe life into the moribund program. The economic stimulus allocated $600 million to Superfund for the cleanup of orphaned sites. Yet, President Obama's promise was to require polluters to pay. Only Congress has the power to impose such a tax.

Since 1995, several legislators have tried and failed to reinstate the tax. Notable among them is Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. Lautenberg is chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health, which oversees the Superfund.

On March 2, 2011, Lautenberg introduced the Polluter Pays Restoration Act. Similar bills were introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. But the legislation has never made it past committees.

We talked with Ed Hopkins, director of the Sierra Club's Environmental Quality Program, about the likelihood of the tax being reinstated during Obama's term. Hopkins said he didn't feel that the tax's passage was likely given both Congress's past reluctance and its current political makeup. David Jenkins, Vice President for Government and Political Affairs of the conservative pro-conservation group Republicans for Environmental Protection, expressed a similar sentiment. "Based on the President's track record so far, and the libertarian dominated House Republican caucus's aversion to any kind of fee or tax, I think it is unlikely that this issue gets addressed during the remainder of Obama's term," said Jenkins in an e-mail interview.

We came to the same conclusion based on our research. Even if Sen. Lautenberg's bill makes it through committee, the chances of it facing a Republican filibuster are high. Moreover, the deck is stacked against any tax bill surviving a vote in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where many members oppose tax increases for any reason. Given these realities we find it improbable that President Obama will succeed in reinstating this tax during his first term in office. We rate this promise as Broken.