Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a complaint stating that EPA managers often ignore risk calculations for new chemicals, subjecting workers to dangerous exposure.
The Toxic Substances Control Act requires calculation of risk to workers to determine whether a new substance is likely to harm health or the environment. EPA managers, under significant pressure from chemical companies to approve new chemicals, are bypassing hazard analyses to speed up the process. Managers omit health effects from risk assessments by deleting risk calculations and ignoring risks other than corrosivity. Managers overruled the judgment of staff scientists in coming to assumptions including that workers once exposed and harmed by a corrosive substance will avoid future exposure. This assumption discounts the risks of a single exposure and insufficiently protects workers from workplace dangers. Since review of new chemicals were required by law beginning in 2016, the EPA has yet to formally reject even one chemical.
Update: ProPublica reports that some EPA scientists pushed back when their managers asked them to remove scientific evidence of certain human health harms from their reports. Those scientists were given bad performance reviews and moved to a new team within EPA. In September 2024, the EPA Inspector General found that their treatment amounted to retaliation.