Under Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency has spent the past year announcing rollbacks of regulations his industry pals have lobbied against and otherwise fought to weaken or eliminate. Many of these rollbacks have been met with lawsuits or the threat of them.
But the rollbacks—whether merely announced or actually implemented—along with proposals for draconian budget cuts have undermined morale so much many veteran employees have quit the agency, helping to reduce the personnel roster at EPA to levels not seen since Ronald Reagan was president. It’s impossible to know just how many of the 1,500 who have left since December 2016 have done so because they don’t like the path down which the EPA-hating Pruitt and his lieutenants are taking things. But it’s not just a handful.
Needless to say, environmental advocates outside the agency are unhappy, too.
Suzy Khimm at ABC reported Wednesday on another example of what critics say is going wrong: the shift in how the potential hazards of new chemicals are assessed, as well as the risks of chemicals long on the market being used in new ways. This process under Pruitt is euphemistically called “streamlining,” subterfuge for lopping off protections that have taken years to develop and replacing them with just what the chemical manufacturers desire:
In recent months, the EPA has quietly overhauled its process for determining whether new chemicals — used in everything from household cleaners and industrial manufacturing to children’s toys — pose a serious risk to human health or the environment. Among other changes, the agency will no longer require that manufacturers who want to produce new, potentially hazardous chemicals sign legal agreements that restrict their use under certain conditions.
Such agreements, known as consent orders, will still be required if the EPA believes that the manufacturer’s intended use for a new chemical poses a risk to the public health and the environment. But the agency won’t require consent orders when it believes there are risks associated with “reasonably foreseen” uses of the new chemical — ones that go beyond what a manufacturer says it’s intending to do, but which the agency believes are reasonable to anticipate in the future.
Instead, the EPA will depend on “significant new-use rules” to shield against potential risks. This is something chemical manufacturers had sought since long before running the EPA was a gleam in Pruitt’s eye. The old system took too long, the manufacturers whined, and was delaying the introduction of new chemicals and new uses.
But consumer advocates, along with some former agency officials and research experts, believe that EPA’s moves are sabotaging a safety review process that Congress had taken great pains to bolster. [...]
“EPA is explicitly disavowing and downplaying a tool that’s really been a cornerstone of new chemical regulation,” said Bob Sussman, a former EPA attorney under Obama and counsel for the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition, which represents environmental and public health advocates. “We believe EPA is taking a big step backward in the protection of health and the environment without an offsetting benefit.”
In 2016, Congress passed reforms in the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). These were gathered together in the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, after the Democratic senator from New Jersey, who died in 2013. The act required that the EPA determine safety, health, and environmental risks of a new chemical under stricter limits before it could be sold. It also extended this requirement to risks of chemicals already sold in the market. Pruitt vowed to speed up such evaluations—which had been deep in a backlog that he boasted had been cleared by August last year.
But at what cost?
“What I’m observing is an effort by the agency and also some in the industry to turn back the clock and behave as though the Lautenberg Act was never passed in the first place,” said Lynn Goldman, dean of George Washington University’s school of public health and a former EPA official under Clinton. “The agency has been granted more authority to do testing, then it put hands in its pockets and said it doesn’t want to use this authority.” [...]
The new law requires the EPA “to review the safety of all uses of a new, and potentially dangerous, chemical before allowing it to be sold to consumers, not just selective uses,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. If the agency allows a chemical to be sold before putting all its restrictions into place, that “contradicts the spirit and letter of the law,” he added.
From its outset nearly half a century ago, the EPA has worked with industries making products or creating byproducts (including waste) that fall under the agency’s regulatory purview. Considerable latitude has been allowed. But ”industry-friendly” isn’t good enough for many corporations. They want kow-towing. And Pruitt and his crew are determined to deliver it.