Earlier this month, the House approved a package of bills that could undercut an environmental law that has helped clean some of the most polluted places in the nation. The measures would allow states to apply their own standards to the cleanup of hazardous waste sites — standards that in most cases are likely to be considerably weaker than those governing the federal Superfund program, the 1980 program that has identified thousands of toxic waste sites and cleaned up many of them.

The program has always required companies responsible for the pollution to clean it up; when responsibility could not be determined, a fund underwritten by special corporate taxes paid for the cleanup. But when Congress refused to renew those taxes in 1995, that part of the program became wholly dependent on annual appropriations, an increasingly dicey proposition. The Environmental Protection Agency would like to renew the corporate contributions, but the House legislation would restrict its ability to do so. Other provisions would make it harder to clean up Superfund sites by requiring the agency to follow state regulations even when they are weaker than federal rules, and the federal government would be restricted from adding new sites to the Superfund list without the consent of the states they are in.

The package is the latest House Republican proposal designed to undermine environmental protections. The House has tried to cut the E.P.A.’s budget substantially, attempted to strip the agency of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases and sought to prevent the government from enforcing energy efficiency standards for ceiling fans and other household appliances.

Thankfully, the Superfund measure, like the others, is expected to stall in the Senate. House Republicans know this. Their legislation is mainly intended to signal that they stand ready to do the bidding of polluters if the party manages to take control of the Senate.