CASE STUDY #1: SUPER FUND Dan Bowers.
I look at the process of Superfund as a good example of an important problem not be getting dealt with due to a slow bureaucratic system. The public administration, for it's part, once the legislation was passed was able to implement Superfund quickly and progressively despite some set backs including a criminal EPA head. To get a good understanding of why the process to get an established form of the super fund took so long we need only look at our system of how to make a bill into law. This is because our Congressional committees used this process to try and shape the Superfund bill to promote their own interests. The super fund was originally brought onto the political scene in late 1979 because of the need for the United States Government to clean up toxic waste sites. The Superfund project took seven years and was in the congressional legal process to see two presidents before finally being signed into law in 1986 with a budget able to sustain it. There was the CERCLA law signed by President Carter in 1980, but it died out because it lacked a budget set for it by Congress. This called for a larger, more complete and longer lasting bill to get the job done, which led to bills S 1341 and HR 4571 to be introduced. There were many places where these bills had problems, two ways in particular, caused it more problems than it should have had. When the bills had to go through different committees they were bogged down because the different committees drafted their own versions of S 1341 and HR 4571 to increase the power of their respective committees on the issues concerning the bills. This represents a failure of our elected public administration officials to get these important bills passed through, turning an obligation to make our society better into a scramble to gain power. Because of these many individual drafts from each committee, the House of Representatives and Senate drafted widely different versions of the bills.
