Corbin Hiar reports for E&E News
EPA plans to quickly revamp its guidelines for evaluating whether environmental contaminants can cause cancer or other ailments, a move Trump administration critics fear is part of a broader effort to weaken the basis for regulating a wide range of pollutants.
At issue is a fundamental responsibility of the agency: How to determine whether potentially harmful substances pose an unacceptable risk to human health and the environment.
The outcomes of such risk reviews can then be used by EPA’s regulatory offices and other agencies to, for example, limit the types of pesticides that farmers can apply to their crops or the amount of hazardous air pollutants oil and gas refineries can emit.
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EPA sources say the Trump administration is now seeking to revise the standards for that highly scientific process in a matter of months. That timeline, experts fear, makes it impossible to do a thorough job and could take years to fix — leaving millions of Americans at greater risk from unhealthy levels of pollution in the meantime.
Currently, EPA has 166 pages of guidelines for assessing cancer-causing risks and no uniform guidance for evaluating other potentially adverse health effects.
But next week, EPA will ask its influential Science Advisory Board (SAB) for “advice regarding upcoming actions related to an update to the ‘2005 EPA Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment’ and creation of guidelines for non-cancer risk assessment,” the agency said in a Federal Register notice earlier this month.
Unlike other topics on the agenda for the meeting — EPA’s proposals to increase scientific “transparency,” redefine “waters of the United States,” and manage toxic nonstick chemicals known as PFAS — the agency hasn’t publicly released any background documents or briefing materials on its aims for the risk assessment guidelines.
