Editors" Summary: Congress is a body often at conflict with itself, and disputes between its authorizing committees and its appropriating committees are among the most pervasive and antagonistic. To administer their programs, executive branch agencies need both authorizing legislation from the authorizing committees and appropriated funds from the appropriating committees. Often, political realities are such that the two sets of committees disagree about the proper way to run the executive agencies. At the same time, executive agencies are sometimes not shy about exaggerating the differences among their congressional overseers as a means of pursuing their own policy preferences.

To this general backdrop of mixed signals, add several facts specific to environmental law: authorizing statutes require federal agencies to control their pollution, congressional appropriators tend to want to control spending tightly on projects like environmental cleanup where benefits are largely local, and the executive branch's organization is a fractured one in which mission-oriented agencies like the Departments of Defense and Energy often see environmental protection as secondary to their own missions. The result can be a confusing set of options and constraints for those interested in real environmental cleanup at the federal government's polluting installations. In this Article, the author sorts through the applicable law and suggests ways to resolve the dilemma between environmental cleanup and limmited agency funds.