Federal Manager's Daily Report

NASA’s projected liability for environmental cleanup has increased from $1.2 billion to $1.9 billion since 2014 and even that may be an under-estimate, the GAO has said.

A main contributor was an additional $500 million for “soil cleanup requirements that NASA did not anticipate” at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory, California. That more than wiped out a decrease at five of the 14 centers where cleanup is needed, GAO said.

It said that even the $1.9 billion figure is not comprehensive “because some projects are in a developing stage where NASA needs to gather more information to fully estimate cleanup costs. Further, NASA limits its restoration project estimates to 30 years, as the agency views anything beyond 30 years as not reasonably estimable. Sixty of NASA’s 115 open restoration projects in fiscal year 2019 are expected to last longer than 30 years.”

In addition, “NASA is assessing its centers for contamination of some chemicals it had not previously identified but does not yet know the impact associated cleanup will have on the agency’s liabilities in part because standards for cleaning up these chemicals do not yet exist.”

Prior GAO reports have found that other agencies, most notably DoD and Energy, also face substantial environmental cleanup costs at numerous sites.

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