by James V. DeLong

About the author: James V. DeLong is a lawyer and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., research and advocacy group that supports environmental policies that give the private sector responsibility for protecting the environment.

Superfund is not a program devoted to the protection of public health. It is an expensive mechanism for reclaiming a limited amount of land for general use. The number of parcels of real estate covered by the law or otherwise needing remediation runs into the hundreds of thousands (though the level of contamination of the vast majority is probably minimal), yet federal policy is to clean up the 1,238 sites on the National Priorities List [NPL] to operating-room standards and ignore the others.

Mistaken Policies

The effort to justify that policy results...