Taming Regulation: Superfund and the Challenge of Regulatory Reform. By Robert T. Nakamura and Thomas W. Church. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 141p. $46.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The central question for this book is how government agencies can “reconcile the necessary use of coercion in regulatory programs with the need to retain popular support” (p. 1). The authors answer this question by examining changes in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) “Superfund” program during the latter half of the 1990s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, reforming Superfund was a salient political issue. Scholars and stakeholders alike considered Superfund a failed program, and during this period, more than a dozen bills were debated in Congress with the aim of significantly reducing its scope or eliminating the program altogether.