EPA staff objected to asbestos use rule
EPA says it will toughen oversight with new measure.
Top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency pushed through a measure to review applications for using asbestos in consumer products, and did so over the objections of EPA’s in-house scientists and attorneys, internal agency emails show.
The clash over the proposal exposes the tensions within the EPA over the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back environmental rules and rewrite other regulations that industries have long fought.
The proposed new rule would create a new process for regulating uses of asbestos, something the EPA is obliged to do under a 2016 amendment to a toxic substances law.
The EPA says it is toughening oversight. However, the way its new rule is written has spawned a spirited debate over whether it will actually make it easier for asbestos to come back into more widespread use. Consumer groups say the agency should be looking for ways to prohibit asbestos entirely.
“The new approach raises significant concerns about the potential health impacts,” wrote Sharon Cooperstein, an EPA policy analyst, in one of the emails. She, along with a veteran EPA scientist and a longtime agency attorney, said the proposal as designed left open the possibility that businesses could start using asbestos in some cases without getting the government’s assessment, putting the public at risk.
The asbestos plan, which was introduced with little fanfare in June, stems from the EPA’s responsibility to regulate chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act and fulfill an Obama-era amendment that requires the agency to regularly re-evaluate the harmfulness of toxic materials. Asbestos is the most prominent of the current batch of substances the EPA is deciding how best to regulate in the future.
Andrew R. Wheeler, EPA’s acting administrator, said the EPA’s plan would make it more difficult to use asbestos in products. The EPA, he wrote on Twitter, “is proposing a new rule that would allow for the restriction of asbestos manufacturing and processing of new uses of asbestos.”
The Trump administration has made government deregulation — of environmental rules, banking guidelines and myriad other regulatory areas — a centerpiece of its policy agenda, and the EPA has been at the forefront of the effort. In recent weeks the agency detailed one of its most significant efforts, a major weakening of federal auto-emissions regulations.
Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts is leading an effort among Democratic state attorneys to fight the asbestos plan, calling it a threat to human health. Exposure to asbestos has been linked to lung cancer, mesothelioma and other ailments.
“In recent years, tens of thousands have died from mesothelioma and other diseases caused by exposure to asbestos and other dangerous chemicals,” she said. “If the Trump administration’s erosion of federal chemical safety rules continues, it will endanger our communities and the health of all Americans.”
The new EPA proposal is called a “significant newuse rule” that sets out the guidelines for what types of asbestos uses the federal government considers risky enough to evaluate and perhaps restrict or ban.
The internal EPA emails indicate that, this year, top EPA officials sought a last-minute change in the language of the rule.
“Upper management asked us to take a different approach,” wrote Robert T. Courtnage, an associate chief in EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, in an April 25 email sent to 13 members of an agency group working on the then-forthcoming proposal. Specifically: Rather than call for all new uses of asbestos to come before the EPA for a risk review, the rule would include just 15 specific uses that would trigger a federal assessment.
The list of 15 included a number of specific and relatively common uses for asbestos, including as separators in fuel cells and batteries and as a component in vinyl-asbestos floor tile and high-grade electrical paper.
Courtnage in his email did not identify who had sought the change. He and other EPA officials who wrote the emails did not respond to requests for comment.
Critics of the rule argue that limiting the review to 15 uses means other potential uses would avoid examination.
“This is presuming there’s nothing under the sun you could ever do with asbestos other than these 15 things,” said Betsy Southerland, former director of the EPA’s office of science and technology, in an interview. Southerland resigned from the EPA last year over the Trump administration’s leadership of the agency and is working on opposing the asbestos rule and others for the Environmental Protection Network, a group of agency alumni.
Narrowing the list to 15 potential uses took EPA scientists and attorneys by surprise, the emails indicate. Three staff members argued in the emails that the agency could not anticipate all future uses of asbestos, and therefore risked letting some uses take place without being weighed for safety risks.
Under the EPA’s approach, if the agency “failed to correctly anticipate some other new use, then it seems to me that the manufacture of such a product would not be subject to” the newuse rule, wrote Susan Fairchild, an environmental scientist who has worked at the agency since 1991.
“Asbestos is an extremely dangerous substance with no safe exposure amount,” Mark Seltzer, an attorney who has been with EPA more than a decade, noted in another email.
A spokesman for the EPA, James Hewitt, said the emails indicated staff and other members of the working group on asbestos “did not fully understand the proposal being developed.”
In a telephone interview this week, Nancy B. Beck, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator in the agency’s chemical safety office, said the rules would restrict and perhaps even ban some uses of asbestos where no means of doing so currently exist. “Obviously someone out there thinks we are increasing exposure to asbestos when we are doing the opposite,” she said.