Trump, chemical industry challenged

Environmentalists protest changes to protective rules that they say favor companies, shortchange the public

The Trump administration has illegally rolled back rules for regulating toxic chemicals in food, drinking water and work sites, environmental groups said Monday as they asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco to intervene.

The rewritten regulations, “overseen by a former highlevel chemical industry official with head-spinning conflicts of interest, will leave children, communities and workers vulnerable to dangerous chemicals,” Eve Gartner, a lawyer with the environmental legal group Earthjustice, said after filing the legal challenge last week in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Other advocates have filed separate challenges to the rules in federal appeals courts in New York and Richmond, Va. The suits will be consolidated in a single nationwide case.

The rules implement changes that Congress passed last year to broaden the scope of the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 40-year-old law regulating uses of tens of thousands of chemicals sold in the United States. The new law increased the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to review the safety of all chemicals in the marketplace, to restrict or ban chemicals found to pose serious threats, and to require new products to meet safety standards before being sold.

According to Earthjustice and the groups it represents, however, rules drafted by President Barack Obama’s EPA before he left office in January have been substantially weakened by the agency under President Trump.

Among the changes, their legal challenge says:

The EPA can now decide which uses of a chemical it should study. The Obama draft rules would have required the agency to examine all “known, intended, reasonably foreseen” ways in which the chemical is used and all populations it could affect.

The EPA will have broad authority to classify a chemical as a low priority for analysis and regulation. The draft rules would have limited that authority and would have classified all chemicals as high priority unless the agency expressly made a contrary finding.

Chemical companies will get a big say in deciding which chemicals receive priority in undergoing federal scrutiny.

The new law allows manufacturers to ask the EPA to analyze specific chemicals. The Obama administration proposed requiring those manufacturers to provide all information about a chemical’s uses and the people who would be exposed, and required the agency to first consider substances that posed a high risk. The revised rules allow companies to request analyses of chemical uses “that are of interest to the manufacturer,” and allow the agency to consider them in the order they were received.

“The EPA’s new rules fail to protect consumers by exempting key sources of exposure to risky chemicals,” said Melanie Benesh, a lawyer with the Environmental Working Group, one of the plaintiffs in the Ninth Circuit case. Others include the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Benesh said the Trump administration agency, in overhauling the earlier draft of the rules, acceded to complaints from the major industry organization, the American Chemistry Council. Its former senior director for regulatory science policy, Nancy Beck, is now a high-ranking EPA administrator.

Beck has removed herself for a year from specific cases involving her former employer, but not from rule-making that affects the chemical industry, according to her statement obtained by Benesh’s organization.

At the chemistry council, Beck “was personally writing comments and letters to EPA about these rules, appeared at a public hearing and told EPA what she wanted to see,” said Gartner, the Earthjustice attorney. “Then, lo and behold, she’s the person with authority to finalize these rules.”

Asked for comment on the court cases, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said the agency “is still reviewing the substance of the challenge, but is prepared to vigorously defend these important rules. We welcome working with all stakeholders in a constructive way.”

“The EPA’s new rules fail to protect consumers by exempting key sources of exposure to risky chemicals.” Melanie Benesh, a lawyer with the Environmental Working Group, one of the plaintiffs in the case