Trump EPA to Speed Chemical Approvals, Slow Microplastics Research
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced a reorganization it says is aimed at reducing its backlog in approving new chemicals, while environmentalists are criticizing steep cuts in overall EPA spending that they say will "tear down" the agency.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the reorganization May 2, part of a new federal budget unveiled by President Donald Trump, that will shift 130 employees into the agency's chemical safety review office to reduce a backlog in approving more than 504 new chemicals.
That's been a priority for chemicals and plastics industry groups. American Chemistry Council CEO Chris Jahn told an industry conference in April he had a "palpable sense of optimism" from the Trump administration and called for quicker approvals for new chemicals.
But a group of more than 600 former EPA officials criticized Trump's larger budget proposal, also released May 2, that called for cutting EPA's overall budget by 55 percent, from $9.1 billion currently to $4.2 billion.
The Environmental Protection Network said the plan would cripple core EPA functions, increase pollution and slow research on emerging threats like microplastics and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.
"The cuts are part of a broader administration agenda to put the interests of large polluters ahead of public health and the environment," said Michelle Roos, EPN executive director, in a statement.
On chemicals policy, EPA's announcement said it was shifting more than 130 staff experts in scientific, technical, bioinformatic, and information technology roles into the agency's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention to speed up new chemicals and pesticides reviews and advance the agency's work on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS substances.
"These organizational improvements provide better tools and capabilities to allow OCSPP to use computational and bioinformatic tools — and eventually artificial intelligence — to streamline and improve the review of chemicals and pesticides," the EPA said.
EPA's May 2 statement said the Trump administration's goal is for the agency "to have employment levels near those seen when President Ronald Reagan occupied the White House."
"We're going to massively reduce this excess spending," Zeldin said in a May 2 video statement.
Slowing microplastics research
EPN presented an analysis of Trump's proposed $4.2 billion EPA budget that it said, adjusted for inflation, would drop agency spending to less than half of that under Reagan or President Joe Biden and back to levels when the agency was founded in the early 1970s.
EPN said the Trump administration's proposed 45 percent cut for a key science unit, the Office of Research and Development, would slow research on threats from PFAS and microplastics.
"EPA's science office serves as the agency's backbone for protecting Americans from air and water pollution, toxic chemicals and emerging threats such as PFAS forever chemicals and microplastic," EPN said in a statement.
EPN Senior Adviser Jeremy Symons, a former EPA climate adviser, called microplastics one of several emerging research issues that require more funding.
"Lee Zeldin likes to talk about rolling the clock back 40 years to the Reagan era, when air pollution, water pollution was much higher and more dangerous," he said in a May 5 EPN briefing. "But microplastics is just one example alongside climate change and PFAS and many other responsibilities that EPA has before it right now, that really speak to increasing the agency's resources rather than decreasing resources."
Major tightening
EPA Acting Deputy Administrator Chad McIntosh told the ACC conference in April that the Trump administration wants to interpret environmental laws closer to federal statutory language, and he called recent Supreme Court decisions limiting authority of federal agencies "just awesome."
He also praised two former ACC staffers who joined the Trump administration EPA in senior roles, Nancy Beck as principal assistant deputy administrator in EPA's OCSPP and Lynn Ann Dekleva, reportedly in management in the new chemicals office. Both had similar roles in the first Trump administration.
"We stole probably two of your top people in Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva," McIntosh told the ACC GlobalChem conference in Washington.
ACC said in a May 5 statement that it welcomed Zeldin's plan to shift resources to chemical and pesticide reviews, and renewed its call to end the EPA's standalone Integrated Risk Information System human health assessment program.
A White House budget document said that cutting the ORD budget from $516 million to $281 million would meet the agency's core functions of clean air and water and eliminate what it called "woke" and too-precautionary approaches to policy.
"The budget puts an end to unrestrained research grants, radical environmental justice work, woke climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations — none of which are authorized by law," the administration said.
In normal Congressional budget cycles, agency budget proposals from a president often do not survive Congressional scrutiny, and lawmakers in the end make much smaller changes.
But EPN officials said it's harder to predict outcomes now because the Trump administration is acting more aggressively to make unilateral changes in federal agencies that are being challenged in court.
EPN pointed to polling that said 68 percent of Americans, and 56 percent of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2024 want increases in EPA spending.
"We feel confident that voters didn't sign up for this and we've seen in the past, including in Trump's first administration, strong bipartisan votes that shut down his efforts to cut EPA budget and staff," Symons said. "But none of that really shines a light on where we are today, when they're trying to do so much of this by circumventing Congress."
He believes the Trump administration knows it will be difficult to get Congress to approve such steep cuts, so it's trying to force EPA staff to leave.
Roos echoed that, saying that the staffing changes and cutbacks have left EPA morale low.
"They're really counting on the agency to be fully decimated, voluntarily," Roos said. "I also want to just take this moment to emphasize how low morale is at the agency."