EDF Health

Selected tag(s): Conflict of interest

EPA: Now’s your chance to get foxes out of the henhouse

By Samantha Liskow / Published: October 10, 2023

Rooster facing fox on a black background

NOTE: This is the second in a series about EPA’s regulation of new chemicals.

What Happened?

EPA recently proposed new regulations for its safety reviews of new chemicals under our nation’s main chemicals law, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). With this action, the agency has a big chance to solve major problems that have undermined scientific integrity, transparency, and public confidence in EPA’s ability to ensure the safety of new chemicals. Unfortunately, the proposed regulation that EPA put out for comment this year falls far short of this goal.

EDF has joined with other organizations, including AFL-CIO, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Resources Defense Council, in a letter urging EPA to make fundamental changes (PDF, 178KB) to these proposed regulations. One of the most important is this: the agency should end its longstanding practice of sharing about the risks of new chemicals with only the companies that make them—and allowing those companies to dispute the results.

Read More »

Posted in Chemical regulation, Industry influence, TSCA / Also tagged , , , , | Authors: / Read 1 Response

Of foxes, henhouses and TSCA implementation: The chemical industry burrows into EPA’s toxics office

By / Published: April 19, 2017

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.

The lead article in this past Sunday’s New York Times is titled “With Trump Appointees, a Raft of Potential Conflicts and ‘No Transparency’.”  It features several prominent examples of recent political appointments of industry representatives and industry lobbyists to key policy positions where they are now charged with or involved in reviewing or crafting the very same agency regulations and policies that were the focus of their paid private sector work just prior to their appointments.

Add EPA’s implementation of the newly amended Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to the list.

Dr. Nancy Beck has just been appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP) at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and reportedly started in that position on Monday, April 17, 2017.  Dr. Beck is moving into her new position at EPA directly from her job as Senior Director, Regulatory Science Policy, Division of Regulatory & Technical Affairs at the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a position she has held since January, 2012.  ACC is the main trade association for the chemicals industry, with a membership of more than 150 chemical companies, including such behemoths as BASF, Dow, DuPont and ExxonMobil.

In her new job, Dr. Beck is expected to play a key role in implementing the new reforms made to TSCA, including in critical decisions that EPA will be making literally any day now, many of them driven by firm statutory deadlines.  These decisions will directly affect the financial interests of the companies represented by ACC.  And they will involve deciding whether or not the agency should take positions for which Dr. Beck has advocated on behalf of her former employer, as recently as last month.  Any reasonable person would see a conflict here, one sufficient to seriously question whose interests Dr. Beck will be representing in playing such a role in TSCA implementation.  But as the Times article indicates, this Administration appears to have little concern about the fox guarding the henhouse.

Nor does this situation bode well for the prospect of creating a credible federal system capable of restoring public and market confidence in the safety of chemicals – which was the key reason that such strong bipartisan and stakeholder support gelled behind the major reforms made to TSCA just last June.  Placing a key chemical industry player in a position where she will now have direct and major influence over the direction that reform will take raises serious new doubts about the industry’s claims that it supports providing EPA with stronger, independent authority and resources to vigorously establish the safety of chemicals in and entering commerce.   Read More »

Posted in Health policy, TSCA reform / Also tagged , | Comments are closed

Towards Safer Food Additives

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: November 11, 2015

Tom Neltner, J.D., is Chemicals Policy Director.

EDF strives to make safer food available by partnering with companies to reduce and eliminate potentially unsafe chemical food additives and supporting efforts to fix a broken regulatory system.

For many years this blog has focused on the safety of chemicals and nanomaterials used in industrial and consumer products.  Most of these substances are regulated federally by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).  But we also encounter chemicals in other ways, including those present in or added to food.  Such chemicals are regulated under a different law, the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act (FFDCA), administered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  This blog introduces EDF’s “Behind the Label” initiative to get unsafe and questionable chemicals out of our food by using dual levers of change—corporate leadershIFIC Charts - 5-16-16ip and public policy.   Making our food trustworthy demands leadership in both the private sector and the FDA.

The food market is changing rapidly as manufacturers work to keep up with consumer concerns about what’s in our food. And it’s not just about added sugar, salt and trans fats, or whether the food was grown locally or with or without pesticides. Public campaigns increasingly put the spotlight on many chemicals commonly used in food and food packaging—food additives—with growing scientific evidence questioning the safety of their use.

A respected industry survey released in May 2015 showed that 36% of consumers rated chemicals in food as their most important food safety concern – greater than pathogens, pesticides, animal antibiotics and allergens, and up from 23% in 2014 and 9% in 2011. These concerns translated into action; 23% of consumers reported changing their buying habits (corrected from 45% on May 16, 2016). Read More »

Posted in FDA, Food, Health policy, Markets and Retail / Also tagged , , | Authors: / Comments are closed

EPA IRIS program requests conflict-of-interest disclosures by commenters

By / Published: November 25, 2014

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.  Lindsay McCormick is a Research Analyst. 

EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) is now requesting that persons who make oral comments at its bimonthly meetings or submit written comments on its documents disclose whether they have “financial relationships … with any organization(s) or entities having an interest in the assessments or issues under discussion,” and, if so, to identify the nature of that relationship, (e.g., consulting agreements, expert witness support, or research funding).   Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Industry influence / Also tagged | Comments are closed

EDF’s recommendations for IRIS conflicts-of-interest disclosures, and the strong precedents for them

By / Published: November 11, 2014

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.  Lindsay McCormick is a Research Analyst. 

Our last blog post was quite lengthy and some readers may not have gotten to the recommendations we provided to EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) governing disclosures of conflicts of interest.  In that post, we also cited the numerous strong precedents for requiring such disclosures.

So we’re reposting here our recommendations and discussion of precedents.   Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Industry influence / Also tagged , | Comments are closed

Time to come clean: IRIS needs to require stakeholders attending its meetings to disclose their conflicts of interest

By / Published: November 7, 2014

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Lead Senior Scientist.  Lindsay McCormick is a Research Analyst.  

EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) has been implementing a number of changes in the last couple of years, in response to criticism and concerns coming at it from all sides.  As stated on its website:  “These enhancements will improve productivity and scientific quality in IRIS assessments and help EPA meet the goal of producing IRIS assessments in a timely and transparent manner.”  IRIS has noted that increasing “stakeholder engagement is an essential part of the enhancements.”

Simultaneously pursuing these lofty goals of increasing throughput, scientific quality, transparency and stakeholder engagement in IRIS assessments is challenging, to say the least.  EDF has and will continue to emphasize the need to strike a balance between these goals, given that overemphasis on one can actually exacerbate the problems aimed to be addressed by another.

In this somewhat lengthy post, we’ll examine one such serious problem – skewed participation in IRIS’ bimonthly meetings.  We’ll look at steps EPA has taken to partially address the problem, and argue that the lack of adequate disclosure by participants of conflicts of interest remains a major unaddressed contributing factor.  We’ll discuss our recommendations for full disclosure and point to the strong precedents for such disclosures in other venues.   Read More »

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