U.S. Said to Aid Firms in Toxic Cleanups : Defense: Pentagon paid $59 million to help contractors remove pollution, report shows. Loophole is seen allowing ‘sweetheart deal.’

The Defense Department has paid defense contractors at least $59 million since 1984 to clean up pollution from their own operations, and the total figure may actually exceed $1 billion, according to a preliminary report by the General Accounting Office.

Results of the study, sparked by a report in The Times last November, were disclosed by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae), who requested the investigation on behalf of the House Government Operations and Armed Services Committees.

The conclusions, based on records from four of the country’s 15 largest defense contractors, bear out a Times report that the federal government was becoming a key underwriter of federal Superfund toxic waste cleanups without public debate or congressional scrutiny.

Under the Superfund law, companies responsible for toxic wastes are expected to pay for the cleanup, but Boxer said Thursday a loophole is permitting defense contractors to get a “sweetheart deal.”

“This report shows that it’s open season for military contractors to get the taxpayers to foot the bill for contractors’ damages to the environment . . . “ she said.

In the preliminary report to Conyers and Boxer, the GAO said four of 15 contractors surveyed reported receiving cleanup payments ranging from $500,000 to $31.8 million and that “future payments to contractors may increase after the contractors begin more extensive cleanup efforts.”

“Further, DOD payments could increase in the future as more contractors seek reimbursement. Only four of the 15 contractors have filed claims for reimbursement with DOD, but others have not ruled out filing claims in the future.”

The two House committees refused to identify the four companies which have made claims, but The Times reported last November that the Defense Department had paid or agreed to pay at least seven companies for cleanup costs they could not recover from their insurance carriers. Those seven were Lockheed Corp., Boeing Co., Northrop Corp., Raytheon Co., General Electric Co., McDonnell Douglas Corp. and Aerojet General Corp.

After receiving the report earlier this week, Conyers and Boxer wrote Defense Secretary Dick Cheney asking him to take immediate action to close the loophole.

The Defense Department, they said, should “immediately begin to institute procedures for collecting accurate data on contractors’ past and projected environmental cleanup costs and the potential cost to the government.”

“The results of this initial GAO review,” they said, “convince us that DOD has no regulations or procedures in place for the capture of data on environmental cleanup costs. The only data that is collected is apparently maintained at hundreds of individual government plant representative offices. In other words, there is no centralized repository for such data.”

Boxer and Conyers said the GAO investigation will continue, focusing on three case studies for a closer examination of the extent to which current practices may be causing taxpayers to unfairly pick up the bill for contractors’ cleanup costs.