This is excerpt was written by Richard Denison, Phd, Lead Senior Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund:
You know how sometimes you know something is going on behind closed doors, but you just can’t prove it? Well, this isn’t one of those cases.
At numerous points in recent years, we heard of secret meetings that Trump EPA political appointees were holding with the chemical industry and the bevy of law firms with industry clients. A key focus was how to short-circuit the agency’s reviews of new chemicals that companies wanted to introduce into the market.
Readers of this blog will know of the many ways the Trump EPA sought to do the industry’s bidding and undermine the major reforms made to such reviews that were prominent among the 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).
One recent episode had to do with changes the Trump EPA made, without any public notice, to the requirements it includes in so-called “consent orders” it negotiates with chemical companies when EPA identifies risks a new chemical may present once marketed. Companies had been complaining to Trump officials at EPA that they found the language used in the orders to be too adversarial and legalistic – that is, too much like, well, an order. A reporter at Inside EPA noticed that, last June, EPA had quietly replaced the old “boilerplate” language with new language more to industry’s liking.
The reporter noted, in passing and without providing documentation, that the new language had been “developed with ‘informal’ input from industry and others.” In response, EDF and other groups sent a letter to EPA protesting the secretive process and lack of public notice. That letter went unanswered…