GAO Releases New Report on IRIS
On Monday, GAO released its latest installment in what has become a somewhat regular series of reports on EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program. In 2008, GAO warned that “the IRIS database was at serious risk of becoming obsolete because the agency had not been able to keep its existing assessments current, decrease its ongoing assessments workload to a manageable level, or complete assessments of the most important chemicals of concern.” Although IRIS didn’t get a clean bill of health, this new report highlights some important improvements in the last few years.
To begin, GAO praised EPA for its decision to start publishing comments that other agencies submit during interagency review of draft IRIS documents. The interagency review process was first instituted during the Bush Administration and because it was originally run by OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), often resulted in long delays for draft chemical assessments. One of the biggest problems was that it gave agencies like NASA, DOD, and DOE – whose budgets and operations could be impacted by further regulation of toxic chemicals – a privileged opportunity to shape EPA’s risk assessments. Now that interagency review is run by EPA, which …
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 …
This week OSHA expanded a two-year-old enforcement program aimed at preventing catastrophic release of highly hazardous chemicals—the type of headline-grabbing event that ruined thousands of lives in Bhopal in 1984 and was narrowly avoided in West Virginia in 2008. Originally targeted at just three regions (and optional for state-plan states in those regions), the National Emphasis Program for PSM Covered Chemical Facilities (aka “Chem NEP”) has now been expanded nationwide and requires all state-plan states to adopt their own version of the program. This is a good step toward addressing a serious problem.
In announcing the expansion of the NEP on Wednesday, OSHA chief David Michaels said that “far too many workers are injured and killed in preventable incidents at chemical facilities around the country,” and that inspections during the pilot period “found many of the same safety-related problems that were uncovered during OSHA’s NEP …
A few weeks ago, Rena Steinzor used this space to highlight some questionable activity happening at EPA’s IRIS office and wonder, “ Is IRIS Next on the Hit List?” The good news last week was that EPA released a number of documents, including the controversial and long-awaited assessment of TCE, giving some reassurance that IRIS staff are still plugging away at their important work (see Jennifer Sass and Daniel Rosenberg over at Switchboard for more on the TCE news).
A new report from Inside EPA, available here, sheds more light on the state of IRIS, by which we now see that the chemical industry’s lobbying arm, the American Chemistry Council, has its cross-hairs trained directly on the IRIS program.
Maria Hegstad reports that ACC recently met with Cass Sunstein, Administrator of OIRA, and David Lane, assistant to President Obama and counselor to the President’s Chief …
Shortly after my August 5th post criticizing their Data Quality Act complaint to EPA, the International Platinum Group Metals Association sent me a kindly-written response letter (Inside EPA recently reported on the letter). Accusing me of both missing the point of their complaint and brushing aside important scientific concerns to make a headline-grabbing call for “over-regulation,” IPA reiterated their concern that EPA’s draft IRIS assessment for halogenated platinum salts fails to meet DQA standards. Their letter is an eloquently-written piece of advocacy, but it provides no information to alter my analysis that their complaint falls squarely within the realm of “frivolous” claims that EPA has the discretion to decline to review.
To recap, both OMB’s government-wide guidelines and EPA’s own internal rules for dealing with DQA complaints (both Bush-era creations) allow the agency to decline to review “frivolous” complaints, such as those “for which …
On Monday, EPA announced its intention to revise the emergency planning rules for industrial facilities. The goal of the revisions is to give state and local emergency planning committees better information that they can use to prepare for chemical spills, explosions, and other disasters at industrial facilities. In the initial proposal released Monday, EPA disregards a request from first responders that the new rules demand more information about the total number of people likely to be on-site during an emergency situation. EPA is proposing that facilities simply report the number of full-time employees, rather than what first responders say would be a more useful estimate of the total number of people likely to be on-site, including contract workers and members of the public.
EPA’s emergency planning rules are based on congressional mandates found in the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA). EPCRA requires industrial facilities …
On Monday, the International Platinum Group Metals Association submitted a Data Quality Act complaint (pdf) to EPA regarding a draft toxicological review of halogenated platinum salts and platinum compounds. This one ought to go straight to the agency’s recycling bin.
IPA, as the trade group calls itself, is complaining that the draft document, released by EPA’s IRIS office in 2009 for peer review and public comment, does not meet the standards of objectivity and utility required under the DQA and its implementing guidelines. In IPA’s view,
EPA’s exclusive reliance on a single and inappropriate study, as well as the proposed reference concentration derived based on that study, constitutes erroneous information, the dissemination of which -- even in “external review draft” form -- contravenes the DQA.
I won’t go into the scientific debate here because it’s irrelevant to how EPA should handle the DQA …
On Tuesday, EPA finalized important revisions to its Inventory Update Rule (IUR), which is the federal government’s primary means of finding out what chemicals are being produced or used, where they’re being produced and used, and in what quantities. The revisions close up some major loopholes created by the Bush administration and should give the agency more accurate data for its chemical management program, which GAO tagged in 2009 as being at “high risk” of becoming ineffective.
EPA made some important improvements to the rule, now dubbed the Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) rule. Manufacturers will once again have to submit data every four years, instead of every five. When they do, they’ll have to submit data for each year since the last report, instead of just the data from the year in which the report is due. The generic threshold for having to report …
Today marks 90 days since the last milestone in the White House’s push toward improvements in federal agencies’ scientific integrity policies. Agencies that have made progress in this time ought to release their draft plans and open them to public comment.
From an outsider’s perspective, there hasn’t been much progress to evaluate recently. It’s something we’ve gotten used to—after an initial push, this administration has not presented much of a sense of urgency in its efforts to set up new scientific integrity policies.
A quick timeline: President Obama issued an Executive Order in March 2009 that proclaimed the importance of ensuring scientific integrity in the federal government and assigned the task of developing new administration policies to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Dr. John Holdren. In December 2010, Holdren issued a memorandum to the heads …
EPA announced Wednesday that staff from the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention are making good on a promise to give the public increased access to health and safety studies about the toxic chemicals that pervade our lives. I applaud EPA for their work. Until Congress reforms TSCA to free EPA’s hand in regulating toxic chemicals, we have to rely too much on an imperfect alternative system, where public interest groups use publicly available data to inform the public about risks and campaign for chemical limits at the state level (see, e.g., BPA). . Broad access to the health and safety studies that EPA has just released, along with the TSCA Inventory and Chemical Access Data Tool, ensures that public interest groups and consumer advocates will have plenty of evidence to back their campaigns.
EPA’s data release is part of an ongoing effort to …
