First in a two-part Series
In June 2016, President Barack Obama signed the bipartisan Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, overhauling the nation’s chemical management law, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), for the first time in 40 years.
The House passed it 403 to 12. The Senate cleared it by voice vote. Environmental, public health, labor and business voices lined up behind it because it did something Washington rarely does, it gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) real authority and real deadlines.
Ten years on, the authority is intact. The deadlines are not. And manufacturers are not the only ones paying for that. So are the workers, communities, and consumers the law is designed to protect. A chemical safety program that cannot finish its work on time is not cautious...it is incomplete.
Fixing TSCA should not touch its safeguards. It should still protect human health and the environment. It should still be able to require necessary testing and manage unreasonable risk. Timeliness does not replace those protections.
Delay is not protection
Some assume that a slower review is a more careful review. But delay by itself does not improve safety.
More than 400 new chemical submissions are currently pending at EPA. Over 300 of them have been waiting for more than a year. Delays are occurring at multiple levels between EPA and submitters with a real lack of transparency on the bottlenecks in the process. The result - decisions arrive late, questions go unanswered, and the program falls short of the timely, reliable process Congress intended.
Congress can help EPA identify and address the sources of delay. The backlog is not a new problem. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that from 2017 through 2022, EPA finished new chemical reviews inside the 90-day window less than 10 percent of the time, and that gaps in workforce planning contributed to the missed deadlines.
Americans recognize that timely reviews are part of an effective chemical safety program. A recent Morning Consult survey on behalf of ACC found that 71% of Americans say it is important that EPA complete new chemical reviews within the 90-day statutory review period while maintaining rigorous safety standards.
Those findings point to a program struggling to keep pace. Clearer milestones, separate measures accounting for agency and submitter time, and a program with the people and funding to finish the job can help get reviews back on track. That is what the user fees are for, and it is why manufacturers support paying them.
Where TSCA protections and practical improvements align
A smarter TSCA program only works if it is a protective one. Four priorities matter most:
- Scientific integrity. Risk decisions should rest on the best available science, real-world exposure data and independent peer review. Real data in lieu of defaults must drive decisions. When it does not, EPA should say what it assumed and why, including how it manages uncertainty. Good science is transparent, understandable, and defensible.
- One set of rules for workers. EPA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can issue overlapping, sometimes contradictory rules for the same chemical in the same workplace. ACC and more than 75 business and manufacturing organizations have urged both agencies to use TSCA Section 9 to build one federal framework for worker chemical safety. The goal is not weaker protections. It is clearer ones. EPA should remain the backstop when other workplace programs do not adequately address a risk, while workers and employers benefit from a single, consistent framework.
- A focus on susceptible populations. The Lautenberg Act requires EPA to account for “potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations,” including infants, children, pregnant women, workers, and the elderly. EPA should clearly identify who is most at risk, explain how those risks are addressed, and complete its assessments in a timely manner. Protections that remain under review do not protect anyone. Completed, science-based decisions can.
- Durability across administrations. EPA leadership has taken real steps to improve the program from the inside. But what one administration fixes through policy changes, the next can undo. That back-and-forth creates uncertainty for stakeholders across the board, from manufacturers to public health advocates. Lasting improvements require congressional action, not just administrative changes.
Protection that arrives on time
This is the point too often lost in the debate: timely review is not a shortcut around safety. It is part of safety. The goal is not lowering TSCA’s bar. It is to enable EPA to deliver science-based decisions in a timely and predictable manner. Achieving that will require Congress to act, and the consequences of delay extend beyond EPA’s review process. They also affect where chemistry, manufacturing, and innovation happen. That is where Part 2 picks up.
