Industry eyes fee reauthorization to update US chemicals law

Just days after President Donald J. Trump was sworn into office for his second term, Republicans in the House of Representatives introduced legislation to roll back a recent EPA regulation that restricts the widely used solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). Legislators also heard from industry representatives about the need to accelerate the approval of new chemicals and a proposed mechanism for updating the country’s primary chemicals law.

During a Jan. 22 subcommittee hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, executives from the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, along with a chemical industry consultant, testified that the US Environmental Protection Agency is taking too much of a precautionary approach to managing the health risks of chemicals.

“Due to unrealistic assumptions about exposures to chemicals, the EPA’s approach has led to unnecessary overregulation that is out of step with the rest of the world,” Chris Jahn, president and CEO of the ACC, told lawmakers. He pointed to the EPA’s recent evaluation of formaldehyde as an example, noting that the exposure limit is 3 times lower than that in the European Union.

Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.) agreed with Jahn that the EPA is overregulating chemicals and setting limits that are impossible to meet. She said that a manufacturer of lithium-ion battery separators in her district is “currently facing an existential threat due to a final rule of the Biden administration made related to trichloroethylene.”

On the same day as the hearing, Harshbarger and Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) introduced a resolution (H.J. Res. 27) that proposes to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the EPA’s final rule on TCE, which was issued last month. Congress can use the act to review and disapprove federal agency rules for up to 60 days after a rule is issued.

The EPA’s overly cautious approach is also leading to a backlog of new chemicals awaiting approval in the US, industry representatives claimed at the hearing. The backlog is forcing manufacturers to take production of electric vehicles, semiconductors, solar panels, and other innovative goods overseas, they said.

Chemical manufacturers made similar claims in 2016, a few months after Congress passed sweeping changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

The changes to TSCA gave the EPA new authorities to evaluate the risks of new chemicals, but they did not give the agency additional time to do so. The EPA has consistently missed the 90-day deadline to approve new chemicals, “hindering innovation and ceding our nation’s competitive advantage to manufacturers overseas,” Jahn testified at the hearing.

“American innovation relies on new chemicals entering commerce in a timely, predictable manner. Unfortunately, the new chemical program is broken,” Jahn said. “At the beginning of December, there were 407 chemicals under review. More than three-quarters of these have been under review for more than 90 days. Sixty-three percent have been under review for a year or more,” he noted.

Jahn made it clear that the ACC is not asking Congress to “open up” TSCA again. Instead, the group suggests making improvements to the law as part of reauthorizing TSCA user fees. Under the 2016 revisions to TSCA, Congress gave the EPA authority to collect user fees from chemical manufacturers to help pay for chemical reviews. But that authority expires June 22, 2026—10 years after the amendments were enacted—unless Congress modifies or reauthorizes collection of the fees.

Republicans at the hearing seemed willing to consider making changes to TSCA as part of the fee reauthorization. “I’m glad we’ve hit the ground running with this hearing and hope that we have signaled our commitment to dig into the statutory language to find out where we can make the law work better for all interested parties,” said Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), chair of the environment subcommittee that held the hearing.

Maria Doa, senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, testified that many of the delays in the EPA’s approval of new chemicals are caused by companies failing to provide sufficient toxicity and exposure data up front. When the EPA receives information later in the process, it slows down the review, she said. The EPA tried to address the problem under the Biden administration by requesting all data at the beginning of the process, but it did little to speed up the reviews.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, released a report on the EPA’s new chemicals program the same day as the hearing. The report recommended that the EPA develop a systematic process to manage and assess the performance of new chemical reviews. The GAO reported in 2023 that the EPA met its 90-day deadline for new chemical reviews less than 10% of the time.

The integrity of the EPA’s new chemicals program has been under close watch by the agency’s inspector general (IG) for years because of intense pressure from industry to speed up the approval of new chemicals. In a series of reports issued in 2024, the EPA’s IG found that during Trump’s first term, managers in the EPA’s new chemicals office retaliated against three scientists who refused to downgrade risks such as birth defects and carcinogenicity in chemical risk assessments.

The EPA’s IG was among the 17 IGs fired by Trump on Jan. 24.