Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale
The chemical industry finally got its wish.Industry lobbyists have long pushed the federal government to adopt a less stringent approach to gauging the cancer risk from chemicals, one that would help ease regulations on companies that make or use them.Last week, in a highly unusual move, the Environmental Protection Agency embraced that approach in announcing that it is revising an assessment of the health dangers posed by formaldehyde, a widespread pollutant that causes far more cancer than any other chemical in the air. Working on that effort were two of those former industry insiders, who are now top EPA officials.The proposed revisions to the assessment, released Wednesday, nearly double the amount of formaldehyde considered safe to inhale compared with the version that was finalized in the last weeks of the Biden administration. Even that older assessment significantly underestimated the dangers posed by formaldehyde, a ProPublica investigation published last year found.Under previous Republican and Democratic administrations, EPA scientists were instructed to assume that chemicals that cause cancer by damaging DNA the largest group of carcinogens, which includes formaldehyde pose a linear risk, meaning that even small exposures can be dangerous. The agency adopted the approach almost 40 years ago to protect against the multitude of low-level cancer threats the public faces daily. But the industrys favored method assumes that certain carcinogens pose no risk at lower levels and that the danger should only be considered once exposure reaches a certain threshold.The Trump administration has already criticized the use of the linear model for calculating the risk of cancer from radiation and could scrap its use in examining other chemicals.The EPAs adoption of this threshold model for formaldehyde might come as little surprise given that some of the scientists who have promoted the approach on behalf of companies are now running the agency.Among them are Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, who both previously worked for the chemical industrys main trade group, the American Chemistry Council, which represents more than 190 companies and has vigorously pushed back against the EPAs efforts to regulate formaldehyde. As recently as 2022, Dekleva, then senior director of the trade groups chemical products and technology division, wrote to an EPA scientist to advocate using the threshold approach in assessing the chemical. The EPA subsequently explored and dismissed the suggestion; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine independently examined the decision and supported it.Today Dekleva serves as the deputy assistant administrator of the EPAs Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, which conducted the formaldehyde assessment. Beck, a principal deputy assistant administrator who runs the office, signed off on the official agency memo that described the changes.According to federal conflict of interest rules, EPA employees are prohibited for a year from working on specific issues in which their former employer is a party or represents one, unless they first obtain written permission from the agencys ethics office. Beck and Dekleva did not respond to requests for comment.Asked about Dekleva and Becks involvement in the recent decision to change the agencys approach to the risks of formaldehyde, an EPA spokesperson wrote in an email to ProPublica that Beck and Dekleva had obtained ethics advice from the agency that approved their work on the issue. Because formaldehyde is produced by many manufacturers and is used across many industrial sectors, this risk evaluation is not a specific party matter that raises concerns for them under the federal ethics rules, the spokesperson wrote.The spokesperson described the changes to the formaldehyde assessment as corrections of past scientific mistakes. Through a rigorous peer review process, we determined the Biden Administration used flawed analyses in its risk assessment of formaldehyde, the spokesperson wrote. We are correcting the record to reflect the best available science and our core statutory obligations.The assessment released under Biden found 58 situations in which workers or consumers face an unreasonable risk to health from formaldehyde a designation that requires the agency to mitigate it. Among the items that can emit dangerous levels of the chemical are automotive-care products like car waxes, along with crafting supplies, ink and toner, photographic supplies and fabrics, building materials, textiles and leather goods. The EPA is reversing the finding that formaldehyde presents an unreasonable risk to health in five situations while leaving dozens more standing. One of those five involves the manufacturing of wood products.The agency contends that the level of formaldehyde the EPA now says is acceptable under the revised assessment will protect people from cancer and the other harmful effects, which include asthma, miscarriage and fertility problems.But environmental advocates see the Trump administrations reversal on cancer risk as a reflection of industrys influence over the agency.The science on formaldehyde hasnt changed; these are the same arguments that the chemical industrys been peddling for the last decade, said Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, an attorney at Earthjustice, the countrys biggest public interest environmental law firm. The only difference is that theyve finally found an administration willing to ignore the findings of its own scientists.For decades, formaldehyde has been at the center of bitter battles between industry and regulators. Sometimes described as the backbone of American commerce, the chemical is used in everything from binding particleboards in furniture to serving as a building block in plastic and preserving bodies and has fierce defenders in many sectors.Our investigation identified significant levels of formaldehyde inside cars, stores and our own homes. ProPublicas analysis of EPA data also determined that, in every census block throughout the country, the risk of getting cancer from exposure to formaldehyde in outdoor air over a lifetime is higher than the limit of one incidence of cancer in a million people, the agencys goal for air pollutants. According to our analysis, some 320 million people nearly all Americans live in areas of the U.S. where the lifetime cancer risk from outdoor exposure to formaldehyde is 10 times higher than the agencys ideal.As of last year, official EPA estimates put the average risk from formaldehyde in the air at 20 times higher than the limit. But, as our investigation found, that number does not reflect the risk of myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer. (EPA scientists calculated that risk but, because of internal disputes about its certainty, left it out of their final number.) When myeloid leukemia is included, the cancer risk from formaldehyde jumps to 77 times higher than the limit.Former EPA veterans fear that the threshold approach to evaluating cancer risk could be applied to ease health-based protections on other carcinogens. This will open the floodgates, said Tracey Woodruff, a scientist at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine who worked at the EPA for 13 years. Chemical companies want every carcinogen to be considered a threshold carcinogen, which would allow them to say that their chemicals are safe when we know that is not true.The agency is in the process of producing risk evaluations for several other potentially cancer-causing chemicals, including 1,2-dichloroethane and 1,3-butadiene, which are used in plastics manufacturing. These decisions are especially consequential because, after the EPA finalizes a rule based on the assessment, states are prohibited from issuing their own protections on the same chemical.The EPA can finalize its proposed changes to its formaldehyde assessment after the public comment period ends on Feb. 2. Then it must issue a rule that addresses any unreasonable risk posed by the chemical.Read MoreFormaldehyde Causes More Cancer Than Any Other Toxic Air Pollutant. Little Is Being Done to Curb the Risk.The Trump administration is also taking aim at the use of the linear approach to cancer risk from radiation. An executive order issued in May deemed the method of assessing a chemicals cancer risk to be flawed and directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consider adopting new radiation exposure limits. Project 2025, the blueprint for the Trump presidency, similarly urges the EPA office that handles radiation to reassess the linear approach it has taken to cancer risk from radiation in the past. The EPA press office did not respond to a question about whether this work is underway.The new revision to the formaldehyde assessment also marks a stark break with the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, an EPA program that quantified the health risks from formaldehyde last year. Previously, reports like the formaldehyde assessment, which was conducted under the federal chemicals law known as the Toxic Substances Control Act, have relied on values calculated by IRIS. But, in what appears to be an agency first, the EPA rejected the levels that the program calculated for the chemical last year.The sidelining of IRIS was another item on the chemical industrys wishlist and, with the EPAs latest changes on formaldehyde, also appears to be near complete. Project 2025 called for the elimination of the program. Of 55 scientists who worked on its recent assessments, only eight remain in their jobs after a reorganization of the agency, ProPublica found in October. The EPA has still not published the most recent IRIS report, an assessment of the toxicity of the forever chemical PFNA, which was finalized in April.The EPA did not respond to questions about when it plans to publish the PFNA assessment or the status of the program.The post Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale appeared first on ProPublica.
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