340 
lations.” I suppose you could have added “acts of God,’ and that 
would probably just cover the waterfront. 
What makes you think that if we change the law that we are 
going to get an executive agency in this administration to carry out 
the new law? I thought that the December 31, 1981 deadline was 
pretty clear cut. I did not think it was ambiguous. Yet, we find it 
was very severely undercut. How do you deal with an administra- 
tion that will not carry out the law? 
Mr. KaM LET. I think I can respond to that. The statement that I 
made in the testimony referred specifically to the problem of desig- 
nation of ocean dumpsites. It seemed to me that there, rather than 
simply specifying a deadline which, if passed, would simply have to 
be extended or would be extended de facto, if you instead said that 
the availability of these sites for continued use for ocean dumping 
would automatically expire as of a certain date if these sites were 
not previously studied, I think that would have a rather different 
effect. 
One effect it would have would be to cause those in whose self- 
interest continued availability of those sites was—you would have 
them clamoring to EPA and the other agencies involved to get on 
with studying those sites so that use of those sites would not be 
closed off to them at the expiration of the specified deadline. It 
would be a self-executing deadline rather than the sort that we 
have had in the law in the past. That is the critical difference. 
That is the only sort of approach that has a chance of working. 
Mr. HuaGues. It seems to me that there would be ways to circum- 
vent that. The basic problem that this committee has is that we 
have different philosophies and different approaches in dealing 
with this issue. You can talk about the Sofaer decision and the 
EPA’s refusal to appeal the decision, but the fact of the matter is 
that the administration does not want to carry out the intent of 
the law. The law was rather clear in what was intended. We took 
EPA’s criteria and we tried to put it in concrete. We tried to phase 
out what EPA had established back in 1977 as harmful ocean 
dumping. EPA is going to have the wherewithal even with the 
changes that are proposed, which you embrace, to be able to cir- 
cumvent that as a matter of policy. 
Mr. KAMLET. Certainly there is no absolutely foolproof way to 
prevent an intransigent agency from continuing to be intransigent. 
Mr. HuGues. Except perhaps to challenge them in the courts. 
Mr. KAMLET. Even that is a matter of leading a horse to water 
and not being able to make him drink. There are very few in- 
stances of Federal judges holding agency administrators in con- 
tempt of court and throwing them in jail. That certainly is an 
option. We are seriously considering and most likely will pursue 
contempt of court proceedings against the EPA administrator with 
respect to their blatant disregard of the settlement agreement in 
our site designation lawsuit. Maybe that will do some good. 
It seems to us that we are bound to pursue every option—admin- 
istrative, judicial, and legislative—to try to bring this problem 
under control. I think the legislative option is certainly at least as 
important as each of the others. The thrust and intent of the draft 
amendments is very commendable and we support it. 
