The environmental community breathed a small sigh of relief last week when congressional negotiators released a spending bill without policy riders that would have prevented EPA from advancing rules on greenhouse gases, endangered species, and coal ash. One rider that was included will slow EPA’s efforts to assess toxic chemicals’ potential health effects under the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) process. Although the rider was substantially revised from a version floated in the House in July, it will still delay important public health protections on arsenic and other toxic chemicals.
Ever since the National Research Council released its review of the IRIS formaldehyde assessment in April, the chemical industry and its GOP allies have been arguing that the IRIS program should be stopped until EPA revamps its process for assessing chemical risks. The NRC committee went beyond its charge of assessing EPA’s draft formaldehyde assessment and included some significant criticisms regarding the form of recent IRIS assessments and EPA’s transparency about its methods for developing assessments. But even though NRC’s complaints were serious, the reviewers were careful to state explicitly that EPA should not delay even the formaldehyde assessment as the agency works toward implementing NRC’s recommendations for improving the IRIS process.
The chemical industry’s congressional backers like to embrace the NRC report, but conveniently omit the part about not stalling current assessments. These industry backers shoehorned some particularly extreme riders into the budget bill debated in the House in July. Among other things, they could have stopped EPA from issuing air toxics regulations or Superfund cleanup decisions based on existing IRIS values, making the current database useless and preventing enforcement of many existing rules.
Fortunately, the IRIS rider that Congress approved last week was far less obtrusive into EPA’s broader regulatory policies – it does not impact enforcement of clean air regulations or Superfund cleanups. It still requires EPA to submit IRIS’s draft assessment of inorganic arsenic (and potentially two other chemicals) to NAS for review. This sounds reasonable on the face, but in practice is meant to cause delay for the arsenic assessment as well as for IRIS’s work generally. The American public can ill afford these delays in toxic chemical assessments. As we’ve described in several white papers over the last few years, the slow development of IRIS assessments has left the database with gaps in coverage that hamper EPA regulators’ work on clean air rules, Superfund cleanups, and drinking water standards. What IRIS really needs from Congress is a boost in funding and staff, not restrictions on its work.
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EPA must report to Congress on its implementation of the NRC recommendations by 12/1/2011 |
Report now due by 3/1/2012 |
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No funds shall be used to take any administrative action based on any draft or final assessment that does not incorporate the NRC/Formaldehyde recommendations |
Not included |
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No funds shall be used to take any administrative action based on any draft or final assessment which has not fully documented implementation of NRC/Formaldehyde recommendations |
For draft assessments released in FY2012, EPA shall include documentation of implementation of NRC/Formaldehyde recommendations |
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EPA shall contract with NAS to conduct up to 3 reviews of upcoming assessments; one must be for inorganic arsenic, NAS to choose others |
Same, but with 18-month time limit on NAS reviews |
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No use of draft arsenic values for any Federal regulatory or permitting decisions |
Not included |
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No funds shall be used for action on any proposed rule, regulation, guidance, goal or permit, issued after 5/21/2009, that would result in the lowering or further lowering of any exposure level that would be within or below background concentrations in ambient air, public drinking water sources, soil, or sediment |
Not included |
Showing 2,818 results
Matt Shudtz | December 20, 2011
The environmental community breathed a small sigh of relief last week when congressional negotiators released a spending bill without policy riders that would have prevented EPA from advancing rules on greenhouse gases, endangered species, and coal ash. One rider that was included will slow EPA’s efforts to assess toxic chemicals’ potential health effects under the […]
Rena Steinzor | December 15, 2011
The Obama Administration is sending mixed messages. On the one hand, several top economic officials have noted the extensive evidence that a lack of demand, rather than regulation, is the cause of a slow economic recovery and low job creation. Yet the President himself has contradicted his economic advisers on the issue in a misguided […]
Dan Rohlf | December 13, 2011
A draft policy released for comment last week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service took on the challenging question of defining the circumstances under which only a portion of an ailing species may be eligible for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. Unfortunately, the Services’ proposal continued the […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | December 7, 2011
On Tuesday, Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) introduced the Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act, legislation that offers a number of proposals for jump-starting the economy. The bill includes two provisions that would hobble the regulatory system without generating the new jobs that the Senators seek. If these provisions were enacted, the bill would […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | December 7, 2011
Within the last hour, the House of Representatives approved the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act – the REINS Act. The bill was among House Republicans’ top priorities for the year, and they’ve made it and a series of other anti-regulatory bills a centerpiece of their agenda. The plain purpose of the […]
Isaac Shapiro | December 7, 2011
Cross-posted from the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics blog. Isaac Shapiro is EPI’s Director of Regulatory Policy Research. The House of Representatives is poised to vote for the REINS (Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny) bill today; this would come on top of votes on two bills last week that would also upend […]
Rena Steinzor | December 6, 2011
Booth Goodwin, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia, and Attorney General Eric Holder announced today a landmark settlement with Alpha Natural Resources, the coal company that bought out its rival Massey Energy after a catastrophic explosion deep within the Big Branch mine killed 29 miners. Alpha recently announced that its third […]
Rena Steinzor | December 6, 2011
New York Times columnist David Brooks weighs in this morning on CPR’s latest report, Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Health, Worker Safety and the Environment. To his credit, he begins by dismissing one of congressional Republicans’ principal lines of argument for 2011 – that an imagined tsunami of […]
Ben Somberg | December 2, 2011
The CPR white paper on OIRA earlier this week looked at how this little office within OMB facilitates an industry-dominated process that serves to weaken regulations proposed by federal agencies. Appearances by industry representatives have outnumbered those by public interest lobbyists more than 5-to-1 in meetings at OIRA in the last ten years, the paper […]