WASHINGTON – Yesterday the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general released a new report, “Report Investigation: Whistleblower Reprisal Investigation.”
The report responds to hotline complaints the IG received from EPA employees about an agency chemicals office and whether they resulted in retaliation against them. The report reveals that career employees were significantly and inappropriately pressured by political appointees between May 2019 and October 2020 to change their scientific opinions on new chemicals.
The following is a statement from Scott Faber, the Environmental Working Group’s senior vice president for government affairs:
Today’s report confirms the importance of restoring scientific integrity to the EPA’s review of toxic chemicals. During the last administration, political appointees inappropriately pressured career staff to put chemical industry profit ahead of public health. Career staff reported being ‘pushed like animals on a farm’ to speed up new chemical reviews by adopting industry’s risk conclusions instead of their own rigorous, independent scientific analyses.
The report also reconfirms the importance of providing the EPA with the resources needed to ensure that new chemicals and legacy chemicals are safe. Despite its new and significant responsibilities, the EPA’s chemical safety office has been chronically underfunded.
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.
Congress gave the EPA authority to collect fees to offset up to a quarter of implementation costs. But an agency rule for collecting those fees, developed in 2018, didn’t use the true costs of implementing the law. And it excluded the costliest activities – review of older legacy chemicals – from being subject to fees at all.
The EPA cannot properly review chemicals to make sure they are safe without sufficiently trained people free from political pressure. 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.
But rather than work with Congress to ensure that the EPA has the resources it needs, some polluters and their trade associations and fellow travelers have sought to weaken the agency’s reviews to allow new chemicals into commerce before they are proven safe.
This report should serve 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 and are protected from inappropriate political pressure. Instead, some are throwing even more sand in the gears by sowing doubt about the need for even having chemical safety reviews.
Just a few years after bipartisan agreement to expedite the EPA’s review of dangerous chemicals, some are now suggesting that long overdue regulatory actions to protect workers and consumers from toxic substances – like asbestos, methylene chloride, ethylene oxide and trichloroethylene – threaten everything from life-saving medicines to national security.
The real risks here are the risk of cancer and other health harms posed by exposure to toxic chemicals, not imaginary risks to our economy.
Like many chemicals that have escaped regulation for decades, these toxic chemicals threaten consumers and workers, including service members. The current administration has taken action to protect us from asbestos, methylene chloride, ethylene oxide, TCE, chlorpyrifos, DCPA, acephate, PCNB, PCE, NMP and other poisons. These actions restore Congress’ clear intent to protect us from toxic chemicals, not safeguard industry profits.
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The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.
