The demise of efforts by a broadly based coalition of stakeholders to reauthorize Superfund in the 103rd Congress leaves the legislative field open for reconsidering all the key assumptions underlying the "consensus" bill that dominated last year's debate. Unless the coalition remains unified, and the Administration supports it aggressively, the substance will begin to unravel, the process will become chaotic, and Congress could easily miss the December 1995 deadline to reauthorize the statute.

It is clearly the fond hope of some that from the ashes of this dissension, a phoenix will rise, taking the form of a repeal of retroactive liability in exchange for an expansion of the federal trust fund. Although the so-called public works alternative was rejected by key committees during the 1993-1994 reauthorization debate, the Republican-led Congress is sufficiently volatile, the Administration sufficiently weak, and opposition to the consensus legislation sufficiently mobilized that its resurrection is a distinct possibility. Because the public works alternative has never achieved enough political momentum to be seen as a real alternative to more moderate reforms, few have analyzed its implications critically. As the reauthorization debate continues, such an analysis is long overdue.