Central Hazardous Materials Fund

What this funds

Office of the Secretary FY 2027 Budget Justification of Reclamation (BOR), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the Office of the Secretary, including the Office of Budget and the Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance (OEPC). OEPC provides guidance, coordination, and oversight of the CHF, and chairs the TRC. Program Management -- The OEPC manages the CHF to provide: ' Direction, consistency, and coordination of the Department's Central Hazardous Materials Fund ' Oversight of contaminated site cleanups, and the subsequent monitoring and maintenance of remedial actions, to achieve timely and protective response actions. ' Optimal and cost-effective use of the Department's remediation resources for the Department's Program management activities include CHF financial management oversight and technical support, as well as managing a database that is used to track potentially contaminated sites that might need to be funded by the CHF. This database is also used to identify and quantify the Department's Environmental and Disposal Liability (EDL) which is reported on the Department's financial statements. Cost Recovery -- From the establishment of the CHF in 1995 through 2025, the Department received for the performance of work by other parties.Through successful settlement negotiations and litigation, the Department has used appropriated dollars to leverage response action or recover costs from PRPs at a 4 to 1 ratio. The amount of cost recoveries the Department receives each year depends on several ' Number of projects with viable PRPs; ' Timing of settlements and other agreements; ' Amount of costs already incurred on a project with an agreement; and, ' Projects in which the Department receives funding in advance for future remediation. In 2025, the program recovered approximately $4.9 million from liable third parties. These funds reimbursed the Department for CERCLA response costs already incurred and to pay the Department's cost to oversee third party work on Department-managed lands.These funds also are used to initiate cleanup at sites without PRPs, such as abandoned mines.In addition to these recoveries, the Department oversaw $27.3 million in investigation and cleanup activities performed by third parties in Interior-managed lands. The program also reached a $33 million cashout settlement for the cleanup of a former paper mill in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, becoming the largest PRP cashout settlement in the Enforcement activity to recover costs or negotiate the performance of work by PRPs is a multi-year, to identify viable responsible parties. Negotiations with PRPs can be complex, time-consuming, and adversarial.Legal support funded by the CHF includes identifying and researching documentation of response costs, developing legal strategies for cost recovery, coordinating with the Department of Justice, bringing litigation, or negotiating settlements, and providing additional support to the bureaus and the Department in the development and successful prosecution of claims.

Extracted from Office of the Secretary, p. 131. Verbatim; nothing here is paraphrased.

Contracts funded by this line

46 linked contracts. These are obligations — lifetime awarded money — and they are not comparable to the request above and are never added to it. No total is shown: an award linked to several lines is counted in full on each, so the sum would not be a fact.

Showing 8 of 46 — most confidently matched first, largest within a confidence tier. These are not necessarily the largest 8.

Confidence mix · 45 certain · 1 medium

Linked contracts are a floor, not a census. Coverage is bounded by how distinctively a program is named and, for performer links, to RDT&E and Procurement — O&M and military construction publish no performers. Budget figures are FY2027 request dollars; contract figures are obligations. The two measure different things and must never be summed together.

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Answers come from the figures on this page and nothing else. These dollars are parsed from Interior's Congressional Justification and are approximate — confirm anything that matters against the cited page.