GAO: EPA Process For Rating Industrial Chemicals Poses Risk

Wed. Apr. 30, 2008


In an assessment of EPA's process for rating the risk of industrial chemicals, GAO Tuesday told senators that the slow-moving evaluation of chemicals and procedures for determining whether to regulate them pose a serious threat to public health.

Blaming in part the intervention by OMB in EPA's science-based process -- the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS -- for evaluating the chemicals, GAO's John Stephenson told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that the White House has hampered the government's ability to clear a five-year backlog of chemicals awaiting health and safety assessments. He also said new and proposed OMB procedures for weighing such risks "lack transparency" and leave the door ajar for manipulation by federal agencies and private parties that might be affected by any regulation.

"Factors contributing to EPA's inability to complete IRIS assessments in a timely manner include new OMB-required reviews of [those] assessments by OMB and other federal agencies," Stephenson testified, along with some of EPA's own delaying procedures.

As of last December, he said, most of EPA's 70 ongoing assessments had been in progress more than five years.

Beyond that, he said, the OMB/interagency reviews "lack transparency," in that OMB deems them "internal executive branch documents that may not be made public."

The upshot of such secrecy, Stephenson explained, is that the involvement of other agencies, which might be negatively affected by EPA's findings, undercuts the "credibility of IRIS assessments and hinders EPA's ability to manage them."

In response, OMB released a statement that said, "OMB continues to work with EPA to focus IRIS on the highest priority chemical assessments and to increase transparency of its prioritization process. EPA is working to appropriately capture priorities into its performance measurements."

James Gulliford, EPA's assistant administrator for toxic substances, seemed taken aback by the GAO criticism, as well as from Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer and other panel Democrats, as he devoted most of his testimony to the agency's regulatory regime itself, under the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act.

On that score, Gulliford said EPA has taken regulatory action on more than 2,000 chemicals -- setting standards for human exposure -- and forced withdrawal from the market of 1,746 more.

In all, he said, the agency has reviewed more than 47,000 "new chemical submissions" and now have 83,000 "currently on the inventory list."

EPA focuses its limited resources, he said, on some 2,200 chemicals that "cover more than 93 percent of organic chemical production volume."

But this regulatory record was not what Boxer and her colleagues honed in on, with them citing OMB's increasingly complex procedures for vetting the EPA's scientific justifications on whether to regulate certain chemicals. "EPA scientists are being pushed aside by White House operatives and polluters," Boxer said.

Environment and Public Works ranking member James Inhofe accused Boxer of ambushing Gulliford and the EPA by focusing on IRIS rather than on the agency's performance in administering the TSCA. And he noted that the $635 billion domestic chemical industry is "a crucial part of the U.S. economy and we have to be mindful of what we put at risk if we over-regulate it and stifle its 30-year history of innovation."

by David Hess, with Dan Friedman contributing

Wed. Apr. 30, 2008