Toxics

The appellate ruling rejecting EPA's plan to forgo interagency review of new pesticides' risks to endangered species is spurring debate over whether it could trigger revisions to the agency's review policies, with an environmentalist saying it boosts their push for more-efficient reviews but an industry source says the ruling's overall effect is limited.

Environmental and labor groups are renewing their arguments aimed at vacating the Trump administration's lengthy delay of an Obama-era update to the agency's Risk Management Plan (RMP) facility safety rule, charging the delay violates the Clean Air Act and faulting EPA's claim that seeking public input allows for lengthy reconsideration of final rules.

As the Trump administration prepares to overhaul EPA and other agencies' cost-benefit analyses, EPA's top economist, Al McGartland, says he is working to enhance the certainty of EPA's studies for regulatory decisions, telling Inside EPA that the "explosion" of tools in the nascent era of big data provides both challenges and opportunities.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is urging EPA in a new report to set up a new surveillance program to monitor scientific literature and new studies about health effects occurring at low exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals, in part because of concern that EPA's existing regulatory testing methods might miss these effects by not regularly testing at lower dose levels.