Question:
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examined available data to determine the validity of those criticisms with respect to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). any information?

Answer: State and local officials have voiced strong opposition in recent years to the growing number of federal requirements. At the local level, environmental requirements are perceived to be particularly onerous. Critics of those so-called "unfunded mandates" argue that they place a large burden on local governments, the federal government frequently underestimates local costs, the costs of such mandates sometimes outweigh the benefits, and often the mandates lack the flexibility to accommodate important differences in local conditions. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examined available data to determine the validity of those criticisms with respect to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The SDWA was enacted in 1974 and requires all public water drinking systems to meet drinking water standards and monitoring requirements that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has developed.

CBO chose to use the SDWA as a case study of the unfunded mandates issue because the SDWA has been identified as one of the more burdensome federal mandates. In addition, examining its local cost impact is relatively easy because only a limited amount of federal aid is provided to drinking water systems. Consequently, one does not need to try and separate federally funded costs from locally funded costs for most systems. Even with that simplifying feature, this case study highlights many of the difficulties in measuring the costs and benefits of federal mandates. Data on costs and benefits are limited. In addition, no reliable method exists to estimate the incremental cost of the SDWA -- that is, the additional expenditures that federal standards require water systems to make above and beyond the expenditures that they would have to make to ensure safe drinking water without such standards. Despite these difficulties, this study reaches several conclusions.