Trump reaches new low with pick for office regulating chemicals
President Donald Trump has made a habit of filling important jobs with people dedicated to undermining the laws they’re supposed to administer while pampering the industries they’re supposed to regulate. His nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency’s top clean air post, William Wehrum, is a retread from the George W. Bush administration with a deep doctrinal dislike of clean air regulations. His choice to run the White House Council on Environmental Quality is borderline comical: Kathleen Hartnett White, a former Texas official who believes that the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is harmless. Yet no nomination has been as brazen, as dangerous to public health and as deserving of Senate rejection as that of Michael Dourson to run the EPA office in charge of reviewing chemicals used in agriculture, industry and household products.
Dourson is a scientist for hire. A toxicologist and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, he has a long history of consulting for chemical companies and conducting studies paid for with industry money. He frequently decided that the compounds he was evaluating were safe at exposure levels that are far more dangerous to public health than levels recommended by the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies. His nomination is enthusiastically endorsed by the chemical industry. It horrifies environmental groups, public health advocates, firefighters and scientists and has inspired many letters in opposition to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which may vote as early as Wednesday.
Among the chemicals that received a favorable nod from Dourson is 1,4-dioxane, which is used by paint and coating manufacturers and is also found in shampoos and other personal care products. His analysis recommended a safe level that was 1,000 times higher than the EPA’S recommended level; the agency considers the chemical “a likely carcinogen.”
Another is PFOA, a chemical used by Dupont to make nonstick surfaces. The compound has been linked to cancers, thyroid diseases and other health problems. Working for West Virginia on the recommendation of Dupont, Dourson in 2002 helped establish a safety threshold of 150 parts per billion for PFOA in drinking water. That is substantially higher than the standard of 1 part per billion that Dupont’s own scientists had recommended more than a decade earlier, and higher still than the health advisory level of 0.07 parts per billion set by the EPA last year.
More broadly troubling is that Dourson, if approved, will set back an arduous, yearslong effort to improve the regulation of chemicals. Last year, after many false starts, Congress passed a bipartisan bill that updated the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 1976 law that had made it very hard for regulators to ban or regulate chemicals because industry could easily keep data about its products hidden from the EPA by claiming that the information was a “trade secret.” The new law simplified the task by streamlining it, directing the EPA to review at least 20 substances at a time, giving priority to the riskiest chemicals. The money to do this work will come from as much as $25 million in annual fees paid by chemical manufacturers and processors.
Experts fear that if confirmed Dourson will put a much greater emphasis on pleasing the chemical industry than on protecting public health. He could, for instance, order his staff to cherry-pick studies and data that in turn would lead to lax standards or even allow the continued use of chemicals that ought to be banned outright. In March, the EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, rejected a staff recommendation to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which scientists believe has harmed farmworkers and children. Any decisions Dourson would make would most likely remain in place for years or even decades. EPA reviews take several years to complete, and the agency has a long list of chemicals it needs to study.
It would take just a few Republicans to block the nomination. There’s hope that Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who showed during a recent hearing an awareness of Dourson’s controversial work on chemical safety in her home state, will vote against him in the Environment and Public Works Committee, where Republicans have an 11-10 majority. Even if he wins there, Capito and her colleagues ought to think hard about the impact their votes could have on the health of Americans for years to come.