On March 8, 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published the revised national contingency plan (NCP) in the Federal Register.¹ In early June 1990, Pennsylvania and eight other states filed suit challenging the revised NCP. In New York v. EPA,² the states raise issues that go to the heart of EPA's approach to legal liability for responsible persons in several of its environmental programs. All too often, after a potentially responsible party (PRP) has created a costly environmental cleanup problem, EPA sets the PRP's legal liability at a level that accounts for the cleanup costs rather than at a level equal to the damage to the environment.³ The 1990 NCP continues this trend by allowing EPA to determine that a cleanup is adequate even when the cleanup remedy uses fences or deed restrictions to keep people away from a hazardous waste site, writes off contaminated groundwater, or mitigates immediate harm rather than restore the damaged environmental resources. The NCP sustains EPA's enforcement policy, which confuses the practical need for cost consideration where financial resources will not support full cleanup with the public policy need for liability that ensures full environmental restoration.