If anything good came of recent brinkmanship over federal spending, it might be the reminder that large parts of the economy depend on the federal government. Everything from medical research to food inspections would have been handicapped by a government shutdown.
That’s also true for chemical safety reviews by the Environmental Protection Agency, which are critical for the chemical industry and consumers.
Despite being given significant new responsibilities, the EPA’s chemical safety office has been chronically underfunded. A shutdown would have made a bad situation much worse.
Since Congress updated federal chemical safety law, in 2016, the EPA’s workload has dramatically increased. Before the law was updated, only 20 percent of new chemicals were subject to EPA risk assessments. The new law requires the EPA to complete assessments and make an affirmative safety finding for all new chemicals.
While Congress gave the EPA the authority to collect fees to offset up to a quarter of implementation costs, a fee rule developed in 2018 didn’t use the actual costs of implementing the law and excluded the costliest activities – reviewing older chemicals – from being subject to fees at all.
EPA’s Office of Inspector General, or OIG, recently confirmed that the agency’s ability to meet the deadlines Congress included in the law was at risk because of the lack of staff and resources needed to perform this work. The OIG also concluded that the agency’s risk evaluation capacity needed to “dramatically increase.”
Without trained people, the EPA cannot review chemicals to make sure they are safe. That’s important for companies that want to use new chemicals, and it’s important for consumers worried about the safety of the products they bring in their homes.
Raising expectations by updating the Toxic Substances Control Act but not adding more trained people to meet those expectations is a recipe for failure. The budget for the EPA’s chemical safety program has remained flat for six years – it’s essentially the same as the budget that was in place before the law was amended in 2016. So the EPA missed the mandatory deadlines for all but one of the first 10 reviews of older chemicals.
And its workload will continue to grow as more older chemicals get reviewed.
Requiring the EPA to operate with less than half of what it needs to review new chemicals in the way Congress intended is obviously a mistake. But shutting down the EPA’s chemical safety office would have made the mistake worse. Unless funding is both continued and increased, the agency will continue to struggle to review the safety of chemicals.
The clock is already ticking, and the next shutdown could be just a month away. The past few weeks should have served as a reminder that all of us – the chemical industry and consumers – benefit when our federal workforce has the resources needed to get the job done. Instead, some are throwing even more sand in the gears by sowing doubt about the need for chemical safety reviews at all.
Just a few years after bipartisan agreement to expedite EPA review of dangerous chemicals, some are now suggesting that long overdue regulatory actions to protect workers and consumers from toxic substances like asbestos, the "forever chemicals" known as PFAS, methylene chloride, ethylene oxide, trichloroethylene and other toxics threaten everything from life-saving medicines to national security.
These reckless claims only further undermine support for the agency’s ability to foster innovation and keep us safe.
The real risks here are the risk of cancer and other health harms posed by exposure to toxic chemicals like PFAS and TCE, not imaginary risks to our economy. Like many chemicals that have escaped regulation for decades, PFAS and TCE threaten consumers and workers, including service members.
As congressional chaos once again imperils agencies like the EPA, legislators should keep in mind the real people who are protected by these regulators.
