{"id":9566,"date":"2020-04-20T11:20:31","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T16:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/?p=9566"},"modified":"2024-02-12T11:02:27","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T16:02:27","slug":"former-chemical-industry-official-beck-now-at-trump-white-house-again-interferes-to-weaken-epa-action-on-dangerous-chemicals-this-time-its-pfas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/2020\/04\/20\/former-chemical-industry-official-beck-now-at-trump-white-house-again-interferes-to-weaken-epa-action-on-dangerous-chemicals-this-time-its-pfas\/","title":{"rendered":"Former chemical industry official Beck, now at Trump White House, again interferes to weaken EPA action on dangerous chemicals: This time it\u2019s PFAS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Denison, Ph.D.,\u00a0<\/em>is a Lead Senior Scientist.<\/p>\n

It was only in February that Reveal News\u2019 Elizabeth Shogren exposed<\/a> the Trump White House\u2019s role in dramatically weakening<\/a> the Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s (EPA) draft risk evaluation for the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), which is linked to fetal heart defects at low doses<\/a>.\u00a0 The White House\u2019s 11th<\/sup>-hour intervention, led by former chemical industry official Dr. Nancy Beck<\/a>, forced EPA to rely on a different health effect that would allow 500 times greater exposures to the ubiquitous toxic chemical.<\/p>\n

There was every reason to expect this episode was not a one-off, given Beck\u2019s other actions both while at EPA<\/a> and once arriving at the White House<\/a>.\u00a0 Sure enough, last week Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press<\/a> exposed another such incident, this time involving a group of chemicals collectively known as \u201cperfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances\u201d or PFAS that are showing up as environmental contaminants all over the country.[pullquote]Beck’s first order of business was to compel her former colleagues at EPA to submit the proposed PFAS rule for White House review, which neither the Obama administration nor the Trump administration up to that point had deemed necessary.<\/em><\/strong>[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

Knickmeyer reported on documents obtained by Senator Tom Carper of Delaware<\/a>, ranking member of the Senate\u2019s Environment and Public Works Committee, that detail Beck\u2019s largely successful effort to scale back a rule EPA first proposed in 2015. \u00a0Called a Significant New Use Rule<\/a>, or SNUR, it would require companies seeking to import products containing certain PFAS to notify EPA in advance, thereby allowing EPA to determine whether to allow the import and impose needed restrictions.\u00a0 Sen. Carper made the documents public via a letter he sent to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler<\/a> calling on EPA to finalize the original rule instead of the watered-down re-proposed rule EPA released for public comment in February.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The original 2015 proposed rule had languished at EPA under the Trump administration until it was dusted off as something the agency could say it was doing in response to mounting pressure from states and Congress to address the growing crisis of PFAS contamination.\u00a0 As the proposed rule advanced, so did Beck\u2019s efforts to limit its effectiveness.<\/p>\n

As documented in Sen. Carper\u2019s letter, Beck\u2019s efforts began while she was still at EPA essentially running its toxics office after arriving there in April 2017.\u00a0 Beck had come to EPA directly from the chemical industry\u2019s main trade association the American Chemistry Council (ACC), where she helped lead the group\u2019s efforts to weaken EPA\u2019s chemical assessments and regulations.<\/p>\n

After leaving EPA for the Trump White House in June of last year, one of her first orders of business was to compel EPA to submit the proposed PFAS rule for White House review; up until then, under both the Obama and Trump administrations, the rule had been deemed by the White House not to need such review.<\/p>\n

This cleared the way for Beck to continue her efforts to weaken the rule.\u00a0 Next up was narrowing the scope of the proposed rule so it covered fewer imported products; the new proposed rule would apply only to imported articles where the designated PFAS are \u201cpart of the surface coating\u201d of a product \u2013 a term the proposed rule fails to define \u2013 whereas the original proposal would have applied to all articles.<\/p>\n

Two more demands pushed by Beck were, to their credit, resisted by EPA staff.\u00a0 The result of the wrestling match is that EPA agreed to take public comment on them instead of formally proposing them.\u00a0 Whether the outcome is any different remains to be seen.\u00a0 We will know shortly:\u00a0 The rule has to be finalized by June 22 of this year, a deadline set in the FY20 National Defense Authorization Act passed last December.\u00a0 Keep in mind that between now and that deadline, a draft of the rule has to go back to the White House for another review before it can be finalized.<\/p>\n

\u201cSafe Harbor\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first of these two demands was to allow companies a huge window of time during which they could know precisely for which imported products EPA intended to require notification and be able to commence that importing any time up until EPA made the final rule effective.\u00a0 If that happened, EPA would be forced to remove it from being covered by the final rule, because the import would be already ongoing rather than new and a SNUR can only be used to address new activities.<\/p>\n

EPA\u2019s proposal refers to this provision as a \u201csafe harbor\u201d and it would essentially give companies wide latitude to defeat the very purpose of the rule. \u00a0Not surprisingly \u2013 given the massive loophole it would create \u2013 doing what Beck wants to do is unprecedented:\u00a0 In hundreds of other such rules going back decades and as recently as this year, EPA has designated the date of first proposal<\/em> of the rule as the demarcation between new uses requiring advance notification to EPA and ongoing uses not requiring it.<\/p>\n

Threshold level<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beck\u2019s second demand was to set up front a threshold level of some type (unspecified in the proposed rule) for PFAS in any<\/em> imported article; if companies could get below that level, they could again avoid advance notification to EPA.\u00a0 But setting such a level even for one product requires considerable information on the precise nature of the product, the specific chemicals, how the chemicals are added to the product, and how the product is handled during all stages of its lifecycle, including potential recycling and disposal as well as production and use.\u00a0 EPA does not have that information currently, and the very purpose of the proposed rule is for EPA to be able to get that information through the advance notification process the rule would put in place.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons PFAS chemicals are such a problem is that they are highly persistent in the environment, and at least some of them bioaccumulate in living organisms, including us humans.\u00a0 These properties also make their behavior in specific uses notoriously difficult to predict and draw generic conclusions about.\u00a0 That renders the idea that one could set a threshold up front that would be sufficiently protective for all such chemicals in all possible products even more irrational.<\/p>\n

Last Friday, EDF filed comments<\/a> on EPA\u2019s proposal and these \u201cissues for public comment,\u201d identifying these and a number of other concerns with the proposal.\u00a0 See our comments for details, and stay tuned.\u00a0 This battle ain\u2019t over yet.<\/p>\n

One final note:\u00a0 Beck has recently been nominated by President Trump<\/a> to become Chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).\u00a0 If confirmed, she would serve through October 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Denison, Ph.D.,\u00a0is a Lead Senior Scientist. It was only in February that Reveal News\u2019 Elizabeth Shogren exposed the Trump White House\u2019s role in dramatically weakening the Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s (EPA) draft risk evaluation for the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE), which is linked to fetal heart defects at low doses.\u00a0 The White House\u2019s 11th-hour intervention, led …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":9144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,56093,56096,114108],"tags":[68,106773,39178,39179],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-policy","category-industry-influence","category-omboira","category-tsca","tag-epa","tag-pfas","tag-significant-new-use-rule-snur","tag-trichloroethylene-tce"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12908,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9566\/revisions\/12908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9566"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/health\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}