The Federal Cleanup Program Almost Nobody Has Heard Of

There is a Department of Defense environmental program that has been running for twenty-eight years, has cleaned up unexploded ordnance, abandoned fuel tanks, lead, and PCBs on tribal land across the country, and costs less in a year than the Pentagon spends in a few hours.

Outside the tribes enrolled in it, almost nobody knows it exists.

The program is NALEMP, the Native American Lands Environmental Mitigation Program. If you work on defense environmental policy, appropriations, or Indian Country issues and that acronym is new to you, you are in the large majority. That obscurity is not a curiosity. It is the reason the program is in trouble right now.

What NALEMP actually does

The federal government spent decades using land in and around Indian Country for military purposes. Bombing ranges. Radio relay stations. Airfields, fuel depots, gunnery ranges, radar sites. When those installations closed, a great deal of what the military brought with it stayed behind.

NALEMP funds the cleanup of those leftover impacts on tribal land. Unexploded ordnance. Petroleum-contaminated soil. PCBs. Lead. Abandoned buildings and debris. The work is carried out through cooperative agreements among DoD, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and each participating tribe.

That last part is what makes the program worth paying attention to.

The delivery model is the program

Under a NALEMP cooperative agreement, the tribe scopes the work, hires and trains the crews, manages the site, and closes it out. The federal government funds and oversees. The tribe executes.

This is not an administrative detail. It is the whole design, and it produces three things a contractor-led federal cleanup generally does not.

It builds lasting tribal environmental capacity. A tribe that has run its own sampling, removal, and closeout has a trained environmental staff when the next project comes, and a workforce that can compete for other work.

It keeps the money and the jobs in the community, in places where there is usually not much of either.

And it produces cleanups that reflect how the land is actually used. A federal contractor working from a scope of work does not necessarily know that a particular stand of brush is where families gather berries. The tribal crew does. That knowledge is the difference between a site that is clean on paper and a site the community can use again.

It is also, per site, cheaper than the alternative. Self-determination and cost-effectiveness rarely line up this neatly. Here they do.

The scale

For years, appropriations law set a floor for NALEMP: not less than twelve million dollars.

Twelve million dollars. For a national program covering military contamination on tribal lands in every region of the country, including Alaska, where the density of former defense sites is extraordinary and the logistics of reaching them are brutal.

That number tells you two things. The program has always been undersized relative to the problem it exists to solve. And it is small enough that it can be cut without anyone in Washington noticing.

In the FY2026 cycle, that is exactly what happened.

Two changes, one bad year

The first change was a single word. Section 8022 had said that not less than twelve million dollars "shall be made available" for NALEMP. It was changed to "may be made available."

One word turned a statutory funding floor into agency discretion. Funding for the program came in at $8.6 million, roughly a twenty-eight percent cut from a floor that had held for years. The defective language has not been corrected.

The second change was quieter and, in the long run, may matter more.

In March 2026, the Corps issued its standard NALEMP cooperative agreement template for the fiscal year with a new note in it. The note bars tribes from using standard environmental cleanup terminology in their NALEMP scopes of work. Preliminary assessment. Site inspection. Remedial investigation. Feasibility study. Removal action. Remedy. The stated basis is that NALEMP is not authorized to fund CERCLA activities.

No notice went out. No tribal consultation occurred. No written legal justification has been provided.

Why a vocabulary restriction is a substantive restriction

It is tempting to read that second change as a drafting quibble. It is not.

Start with the fact that the restricted category is undefined. "CERCLA activities" could mean the formal process steps under the statute. It could also be read to mean any work addressing the substances CERCLA covers, which would exclude lead and PCB cleanup from the program entirely. A tribal program manager drafting a scope of work has no way to know which reading the Corps will apply. So the safe move is to not propose the work at all. Ambiguity of that kind does not need to be enforced to be effective.

Then there is the twenty-eight year record. NALEMP, CERCLA, and the Formerly Used Defense Sites program have coexisted for decades without serious conflict. Tribes have conducted NALEMP-funded sampling for lead, PCBs, and petroleum. They have removed military buildings, fuel tanks, and contaminated soil under NALEMP agreements that were approved, funded, and closed out by the federal government. Nothing in the law changed in March 2026. A note in a template changed.

And because the template is national, the restriction is national. This is not a site-specific condition a tribe can negotiate around at the district level. It is a term that arrives in every participating tribe's next agreement.

"Just use FUDS" is not an answer

The implicit response to all of this is that the excluded work belongs in the Formerly Used Defense Sites program, which is far larger and federally executed.

FUDS is a real and necessary program, and tribes are generally open to working with it on cleanups beyond NALEMP's funding capacity. But the two programs are not interchangeable, and the difference is the delivery model described above. Federal execution without meaningful tribal involvement produces a predictable failure mode: a site that receives a formal cleanup-complete determination while the impact that prompted the cleanup is still on the ground and the community still cannot use the land.

That gap between the paperwork and the parcel is precisely what NALEMP's tribally-led structure was built to close. Pushing NALEMP work toward FUDS process reopens it.

The real problem is that nobody is watching

Programs of this size do not survive on their merits. They survive because someone notices when they are cut.

NALEMP has no trade association behind it. No industry constituency. No press coverage to speak of. Its beneficiaries are tribal governments with limited Washington presence, spread across dozens of states, most of whom learned about the FY2026 changes when the money did not arrive or when the new agreement template showed up in the inbox.

That is how a one-word change makes it into an appropriations bill and stays there uncorrected. Not through hostility. Through inattention. Nobody argued that tribal cleanup should be cut by twenty-eight percent. The word changed, and the constituency that would have objected was not in the room.

The same dynamic explains the template note. A substantive restriction on a national tribal program was added through a form document, without consultation, and the affected tribes found out by reading it.

What a fix looks like

None of this is hard to correct, which is the frustrating part.

Restoring "shall" in place of "may" in Section 8022 puts the funding floor back. It is a one-word technical correction or a line of report language. It requires no new authorizing legislation and no spending above a level that was already established. Given the actual backlog, twenty million dollars would be a more honest number than twelve, but restoring the floor is the immediate fix.

Rescinding the March 2026 template note, or at minimum providing the legal justification for it in writing before it is applied to another tribe's agreement, requires no congressional action at all. The Corps wrote the note. The Corps can remove it.

And DoD can schedule the government-to-government consultation it committed to in its own 2021 Plan of Action on Tribal Consultation. Consultation before a program-wide restriction is imposed is the whole point of having a consultation policy.

Why we are writing this

We work on this program. We are not neutral about it, and we are not pretending to be.

But the argument here does not depend on any particular tribe's situation. A funding floor was converted to a suggestion. A national program restriction was imposed through a template revision without consulting the governments it applies to. Both are correctable, and both will stay uncorrected as long as the program remains invisible.

If you work in Indian Country, on defense environmental issues, or in an appropriations office, the useful thing you can do is know that NALEMP exists, know that its floor is gone, and ask about it the next time DoD environmental programs come across your desk.

Small programs do not get saved by good arguments. They get saved by being noticed.

Starzyk & Associates, LLC is a federal government relations firm in Washington, DC specializing in tribal advocacy, appropriations, and congressional relations. If your tribe participates in NALEMP or has NALEMP-eligible impacts and you want to talk through the FY2027 outlook, get in touch.