EDF Health

Selected tag(s): EPA

The damage done, Part 1: A post-mortem on the Trump EPA’s assault on TSCA’s new chemicals program

By / Published: April 8, 2021

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

Part 1 of a 2-part series (see Part 2 here)

With last week’s announcement by EPA that it intends to reverse two of the most damaging policy changes the Trump EPA made to EPA’s reviews of new chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), there is hope that going forward EPA’s reviews will once again conform to TSCA’s requirements and better protect workers, consumers, the public and the environment.

Predictably, the chemical industry and its phalanx of law firms – who demanded and embraced the Trump EPA’s policy reversals – have been howling loudly, doing their best impressions of Chicken Little.  They predict huge backlogs and economic calamity of all sorts, including an end to American innovation, and their lawyers are already threatening legal action – a clever way to drum up business, no doubt.

The fact is that EPA spends scarce resources reviewing hundreds of new chemicals every year that their manufacturers are not serious about – and often not in any hurry about – commercializing.  And industry then uses any delays in those reviews to argue that the review process is too rigorous and demand that it be scaled back.

But facts are stubborn things.

In this first post I’ll look at a few reasons why the industry’s new round of fear-mongering is not based in fact.  And in a second post I’ll look at the decisions on new chemicals made under the Trump EPA to shed more light on the real reason why industry is upset:  It just may have lost the inside track that yielded such high dividends in the form of flawed approvals of hundreds of new chemicals.  Or, as one prominent industry attorney bluntly said recently in a related context, “the good days are over, quite frankly.”  Read More »

Posted in Health policy, Industry influence, TSCA reform / Also tagged , | Authors: / Comments are closed

At all costs: Failings of Trump EPA’s proposed TSCA fee rule

By Lindsay McCormick / Published: April 7, 2021

Lindsay McCormick, Program Manager and Richard Denison, Ph.D., Lead Senior Scientist

When Congress reformed the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in 2016, it authorized EPA to require companies to pay fees to help defray the agency’s costs of administering this extensive new law.  EPA finalized the first “fee rule” in 2018 to establish the payment framework.  Under TSCA, EPA is to adjust the fees every three years both to account for inflation and to ensure it is recouping the authorized portion of agency costs to implement the law.

Therefore, developing an accurate estimate of the agency’s costs to implement TSCA is critical.  Not only does this provide the baseline by which to establish industry fees (as EPA is to set the fees so as to recoup 25% of its program costs), but it should serve as a north star to identify the true resource needs to lawfully implement TSCA.

Recent reports by the Government Accountability Office and EPA’s Office of Inspector General found that EPA’s ability to assess and manage chemicals regressed over recent years due to lack of workforce or workload planning to ensure the agency can carry out its duties.  Both reports recognize the greatly increased scope of work under amended TSCA, and EPA’s failure to translate that into additional staff and resource needs.  Establishing a robust, accurate budget for administering TSCA is the first step to rectifying this problem.

Despite the alarm bells rung by these two watchdogs, the Trump EPA’s proposed revised fee rule seems to have lost sight of Congress’ purpose in expanding EPA’s fee authority.  The proposed rule invokes a new purpose entirely divorced from TSCA: to reduce asserted burdens on industry – without regard to the impacts that will have on EPA’s ability to implement the law or on ensuring health and environmental protection from chemical exposures.  As a result, EPA underestimated its costs and proposed fees such that, if finalized, would push an undue portion of its costs onto the taxpayer.

Below we summarize the major concerns about the fee rule proposal that we detailed in our comments submitted to the agency late last month. Read More »

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

Re-visioning TSCA: Address the cumulative impacts of chemical exposures

By / Published: April 1, 2021

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

Part 4 of a 4-part series – see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 here

This series of blog posts is looking ahead toward opportunities to advance a more robust and holistic vision for implementing the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) as reformed in 2016.

We discussed in the preceding installments of this series the importance of ensuring that combined exposures to a chemical from multiple sources and the greater exposures and susceptibilities of certain groups are accounted for.  But it is critical to also recognize that many other factors influence the impacts chemical exposures have on our health.  This final installment in our series will discuss how TSCA can and should take into account all of these factors – that is, account for cumulative impacts.

Read More »

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

Re-visioning TSCA: Better protect those at greater risk

By / Published: March 31, 2021

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

Part 3 of a 4-part series – see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4 here

This series of blog posts is looking ahead toward opportunities to advance a more robust and holistic vision for implementing the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) as reformed in 2016.

In the preceding installment in this series, we discussed TSCA’s mandate for EPA to conduct comprehensive chemical evaluations.  The Trump EPA’s failure to do so especially detrimental to those groups at greater risk because they are more likely to face the precise exposures and susceptibilities that the Trump EPA excluded.  In this installment of our series, we will address how TSCA can and must be used to better protect those at greater risk from chemical exposures.

Read More »

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

Re-visioning TSCA: Comprehensively assess & mitigate chemical risks

By / Published: March 30, 2021

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

Part 2 of a 4-part series – see Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4 here

After our look back in Part 1 of this series at the damage done over the past four years, the remainder of the series will look ahead and explore opportunities to advance a more robust and holistic vision for implementing the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) as reformed in 2016.

In this installment, we will discuss why legal and effective TSCA implementation demands that EPA undertake comprehensive assessments of chemical risks that supersede the media-specific limitations of other environmental laws. Read More »

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

Re-visioning TSCA after the Trump years: A series

By / Published: March 29, 2021

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

Part 1 of a 4-part series – see Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 here

It wasn’t that long ago, June 2016, when there was hope that our nation was at last embarking on the enormous task of reinvigorating and greatly strengthening our chemical safety system, 40 years after original passage of the moribund Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

Passage of the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act by huge bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress seemed to bode well for robust implementation of the law by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  Even the affected industry had accepted the reforms as essential to restoring public confidence in our federal system (hoping thereby also to stem the rising tide of actions by state governments, retailers, and others to fill the void left by EPA’s inability to ensure the safety of chemicals and products).

We have an opportunity to rethink how the law could and should be used to advance a broader vision of greater health and environmental protection for all people.

Labor and health and environmental public interest communities saw an opportunity to use the new TSCA to drive more thorough assessments of chemicals’ risks.  The failure of our risk assessment-based regulatory system to address the multiple sources of exposure to a chemical affecting many different groups of people had long been viewed as a fundamental flaw of the old law.  Fixing that flaw isn’t, unfortunately, how the last four years have gone.

As we look to the future, there is a pressing need to course-correct on TSCA implementation.  But there is also an opportunity to rethink how the law could and should be used to advance a broader vision of greater health and environmental protection for all people.  This series of blog posts will explore that potential.

But we must start with a brief look back at the damage done.  Read More »

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