05/09/2025

EPA Chemicals Office Reorganization Carries Risk to Agency Goals

Bloomberg Law | Pat Rizzuto | May 7, 2025

EPA Chemicals Office Reorganization Carries Risk to Agency Goals

The EPA announced an overhaul last week of its chemicals office with promises to provide greater efficiency, though industry and environmental policy analysts warn the changes could endanger the public and environment without delivering on the agency’s stated goal.

The Environmental Protection Agency—as part of a broader reorganization—aims to expand its Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP) by adding at least 130 scientists from its Office of Research and Development (ORD), the agency announced May 2.

The new staff will “work directly on the backlogs of over 504 new chemicals in review that are beyond the statutorily required timeframes and over 12,000 pesticide reviews that are well beyond their expected timelines,” the agency’s statement said. The new personnel also will advance a testing strategy for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to help the agency understand their human health and environmental effects, it said.

Transferring ORD scientists to positions focused on the regulatory tasks the agency announced depletes information that multiple EPA agency offices, states, and other interested parties depend on, said Maria Doa, senior chemicals policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund.

The chemical industry has long asked the EPA to make its new chemicals review process faster, more predictable, and receptive to industry data.

The American Chemistry Council (ACC), which represents chemical producers, said in statement it wants more information about the the agency’s plans. But ACC supports the EPA’s intent to use taxpayers’ dollars efficiently and effectively to meet the Toxic Substances Control Act’s (TSCA) requirements, said CEO Chris Jahn.

“Reassigning and training staff to address the challenges with the new chemicals program is an important step to clearing the backlog and supporting efforts to make America the world’s manufacturing superpower,” Jahn said.

The EPA declined a request seeking more information about the planned reorganization, but said it has posted details on the positions on an internal website called Talent Hub. Expertise being sought includes scientists trained in toxicology, ecotoxicology, exposure science, non-animal toxicity tests, and the use of computer software to analyze biological data, the EPA said.

‘So-Called Backlog’

The EPA’s goal of using the ORD staff to focus on whether new chemicals—those never before produced in or brought into the US—can be made or imported says a lot about whose interests are important to the administration, said Doa.

Chemical producers have been critical of what they describe as the EPA’s new chemical review delays, she said.

“This has all been characterized as being a more efficient way to deal with the so-called backlog, but it ignores the real issue behind the so-called backlog,” said Doa, whose previous 30-year career at the EPA focused on chemical safety, risk policy and risk management of chemicals.

Companies submitting requests to produce new chemicals are primarily responsible for the amount of time it takes the EPA to examine the chemical they want to make, Doa said. They don’t provide the agency information it needs until staff begin to identify risks the new substances could pose, she said, adding that the new information then causes the EPA to have to redo its analysis—sometimes more than once.

The EPA’s announcement didn’t say whether the additional staff will focus on analyzing the risks of commodity chemicals, Doa said. Yet those chemicals are produced in such large volumes that they have the greater potential to affect workers, consumers, and other people, than do new chemicals, she said.

A core change Congress made through the 2016 TSCA amendments was a first-ever requirement that the EPA start examining the risks of chemicals long in use by US manufacturers, providing criteria such as potentially high exposures for the agency to use. More than 20 chemicals are under review by the agency with additional substances teed up as potential additions to that list.

Many ORD scientists’ skills can be transferred to the chemical office’s risk evaluations of new and existing chemicals, said Richard Engler, director of chemistry with Bergeson & Campbell PC. “Both new and existing chemicals need help.”

Some ORD staff will be familiar with the the EPA’s new chemicals program because they were temporarily assigned there during the first Trump administration, he said.

Moving ORD’s National Center for Computational Toxicology into the OCSPP also could make sense, Engler said. The center already works closely with the chemicals office on on a variety of projects including the PFAS testing strategy and the use of new methods to study chemicals’ effects that often don’t require animal testing, he said.

Yet this close work raises questions about how much efficiency EPA will gain by changing who the computational center’s scientists report to, he said.

Training Essential

Training the incoming scientists will be important, Engler said. New staff will need to be trained on the tools, policies, and procedures, just like any new employee would, he said. “Research and development is different than regulatory risk evaluations and risk management.”

“As with everything at EPA, all this will take time and these folks will definitely need training, or at least close oversight. Moving 130 staff is certainly a huge undertaking,” said David Fischer, who served as deputy assistant administrator at OCSPP during the first Trump administration and now is counsel at Keller and Heckman LLP.

Adding personnel alone isn’t a guarantee that the EPA will achieve the outcomes it desires, Fischer warned.

The problem in the chemicals office “is less with the number of staff and more with how folks are conducting new chemical reviews” and other work, he said.

Moving staff won’t help if they uses o many assumptions that chemicals and pesticides appear to be far riskier than the compounds likely are, Fischer said.

If the EPA’s reorganization is to succeed, training will have to focus on the 2016 TSCA amendments’ goals that required the agency to put public health first, said Liz Hitchcock, director of federal policies at Toxic-Free Future’, an environmental health research and advocacy organization.