Toxics

A coalition of environmentalists has filed suit against EPA’s rollback of an Obama-era regulation tightening facility safety mandates on the same day the measure was promulgated, arguing the Trump administration has removed nearly all disaster-prevention measures and weakened many of the other protections that were in the 2017 rule.

EPA’s research chief is looking to the agency’s pending appropriations for fiscal year 2020 to bolster Administrator Andrew Wheeler’s “moonshot” directive to eliminate EPA’s use of animal testing by 2035 and develop a host of new alternate chemical test methods (NAM) in the face of doubts that the agency is providing sufficient funds to the effort.

House and Senate lawmakers have released consensus spending bills for the remainder of fiscal year 2020 that would raise EPA’s annual budget to $9 billion, an increase of $207 million over FY19 levels, according to a summary released by Senate Democrats.

EPA science advisors are raising concerns that the agency’s draft evaluation of the risks of exposure to 1-bromopropane (1-BP), a widely used chemical solvent, underestimates risks to workers, the general population and the environment, with the document describing the narrow scope of the human health evaluation as “troubling.”