Column: Many challenges await a revitalized US EPA Jim Simon Early in my corporate career, I was tasked by my employer, Allied Chemical (now Honeywell), to develop a briefing book on the contents of the company’s waste disposal sites to help the environmental affairs department address which locations would require cleanup under the federal “Superfund” law of 1980. I still vividly recall looking at maps of all polluted groundwater zones around the U.S. and New Jersey in particular. Those visuals brought home the need to address a growing national crisis. A driving influence behind the creation of the Superfund law was President Richard M. Nixon’s executive order creating the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which turned 50 in 2020. Given the Trump administration’s cuts to the EPA’s budget and scope, the anniversary went virtually unnoticed.