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</font></div><div><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/01/12/cancer-trump-administration-epa-carcinogens-regulations/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://theintercept.com/2020/01/12/cancer-trump-administration-epa-carcinogens-regulations/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>the war on the war on cancer</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no pix no lnx many no graf</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sharon Lerner</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">January 12 2020,&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WHEN ANGELA RAMIREZ was 38, she felt a slight pain in her chest. At first she thought she had pulled a muscle, but when it didn’t go away, Ramirez went to her doctor, who diagnosed her with stage 2 breast cancer. A mother of three and a parent educator in a local public school in Lake County, Illinois, Ramirez had to undergo a double mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, and five follow-up surgeries.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eight years since the diagnosis, her family is still recovering. Because of complications, Ramirez is awaiting several more reconstructive surgeries. Her daughter Ada, now 15, was recently diagnosed with PTSD, in part, Ramirez thinks, because she spent much of her childhood worrying that her mother wouldn’t survive. And her husband is working 80 hours a week to cover medical expenses and lost income. “Cancer changes your whole life,” she said recently.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramirez used to think of her ordeal as random bad luck — an inexplicable series of genetic mutations that just happened to derail her life. But that changed in 2018, after she learned that she both lived and worked near two facilities that were emitting a c<b>ancer-causing chemical called ethylene oxide.</b></font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Two years earlier, the Environmental Protection Agency released an assessment of ethylene oxide performed by a small division of the agency known as IRIS, which crunched numbers showing that exposure to ethylene oxide caused elevated rates of tumors in the brain, lungs, uterus, and lymph systems.</b> The technical report from IRIS, which stands for the Integrated Risk Information System, changed the classification of ethylene oxide, an odorless gas used to make other chemicals and sterilize medical equipment, from probably carcinogenic to plainly carcinogenic to humans. Based in part on several studies showing that female workers exposed to ethylene oxide had higher breast cancer rates, the report calculated a safety threshold that was 30 times more sensitive than previous estimates. Combined with agency data about local emissions, the <b>new threshold allowed the EPA Office of Air and Radiation</b> to identify the census tracts where residents were at increased risk of cancer from breathing ethylene oxide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">As Ramirez could plainly see on the EPA’s interactive map, the cancer risk was elevated both where she lived and, even more extremely, at the office where she worked for several years before her diagnosis, which was less than a mile from one factory that emitted the carcinogenic gas and less than three miles from another. The news was like a missing puzzle piece. “I had always found it kind of strange that I was the only one in my family who ever had cancer,” said Ramirez, who had moved to the suburbs from Chicago in 2005 in part because she wanted to be closer to nature.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramirez still suffers from chronic back pain and weakness. But the realization that her cancer may have resulted from emissions from the local factories has caused a different kind of suffering. “Every time I open the windows I think about it now,” she said. “I’m so angry. My kids at 2nd and 3rd grade shouldn’t have had to wonder whether their mother was going to die.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Angela Ramirez's neighborhood is seen in this photo. The neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is located in a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Jan. 2, 2020. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide, a gas linked to cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Left/Top: The Ramirez's neighborhood in Waukegan, Ill., is part of a census tract that is at high risk for cancer. Right/Bottom: Construction at Medline's facility in Waukegan, Ill. is underway on Jan. 2, 2020. In May 2019, Medline submitted a proposal to build new equipment that would control air pollution, after they came under fire for emitting ethylene oxide.Photos: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);"><b>The chemical industry also reacted strongly</b> to the reports on ethylene oxide. In September 2018, after the National Air Toxics Assessment pinpointed the areas affected by the chemical, the American Chemistry Council, or ACC, a trade group that represents U.S. chemical manufacturers, asked IRIS to change its assessment of ethylene oxide. Dow Chemical, the biggest producer of ethylene oxide in the country and the second biggest in the world, also disputed the EPA’s assessment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Now, political appointees at the EPA are engaged in what appears to be an end-run around the agency’s own science</b>. While IRIS, which is staffed by career scientists, hasn’t officially backed away from its 2016 report, the<b> Trump EPA recently announced that it would not be calling for the level of pollution reductions IRIS laid out during the previous administration,</b> leaving people around the country more vulnerable to the known carcinogen. And that’s only one of the changes made under the Trump administration that promise to weaken protections for Americans’ health, many of which were intended specifically to stave off cancers.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Virtually no sector of the EPA’s work has escaped reversals that will cause disease and death among the U.S. population.</b> The agency scrapped the Clean Power Plan and a rule to improve fuel efficiency standards for cars, depriving the public of not just the climate benefits but also the improvements to air quality and health both would have brought. The EPA rejected its own science in deciding not to ban <b>chlorpyrifos</b>, a pesticide linked to autism and other neurodevelopmental problems in children. Dozens of other EPA rollbacks — including the gutting of the Clean Water Act, the undermining of guidelines on emissions of <b>methane from landfills, the loosening of restrictions on toxic air pollution from industrial facilities, the disbanding of a panel on air pollution — will have dire health consequences, as will the dramatic reduction in the enforcement of environmental laws.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The erosion of these protections may leave Americans at greater risk of all kinds of health effects, including fertility issues, birth defects, and neurodevelopmental problems — all of which have been linked to chemical exposure. But among the most devastating of Trump’s legacies will be an increase in cancers.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s Cancer Gang</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">With the election of Donald Trump, a small and previously marginalized group of toxics apologists suddenly and unexpectedly took control over health and environmental regulations in the United States. Considered too fringe, too craven, and too fact-averse for mainstream politics, this closely connected group had long been dismissed for taking the idea of environmental deregulation well past the point of absurdity. Under Trump, the EPA has begun executing some of these extremists’ schemes to undercut the federal government’s ability to protect the public from life-threatening toxic chemicals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Way back in 1996, a lawyer named Christopher Horner working for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company</span> came up with an ambitious plan to fight back against scientific studies linking cancer to secondhand smoke. Such studies, he realized, were based on the private health data of thousands of individuals. And without that data, scientists would be unable to prove a connection between cigarette smoke and cancer. Imagine if the government required that the data used for regulations be public. If that were the case, none of the crucial private health information used by scientists would be usable. Problem solved!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);"><b>Horner, who worked at the firm then called Bracewell & Giuliani</b>, recognized that the approach had “global applicability to industry” beyond tobacco and could make it nearly impossible to regulate a wide variety of cancer-causing chemicals and pollution. Within a few years, a group funded by the Koch brothers tried to use the strategy to undermine the Clean Air Act, demanding that researchers produce their data so a pivotal study could be repeated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>That attempt to destroy air pollution protections ultimately failed, and the idea hovered on the sidelines until 2014, when a few Republican House members introduced the “Secret Science Act.”</b> Because most members of Congress recognized the gambit as a bald attempt to subvert science — then-Sen. Barbara Boxer called it “insane,” Sen. Bernie Sanders dismissed it as “laughable” — the bill didn’t come close to becoming law that year or the next, when it was introduced again. Even in mid-2016, the only support for the idea came from the fringe.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But with the election of Donald Trump later th<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">at year, the prospects of the “secret science” scheme — and others hatched over the years to help free industry of what it saw as profit-hampering regulations — suddenly became deadly serious.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Trump, who had already been dismissive of science, named Horner and others interested in undermining environmental protections to his EPA transition team and then staffed the agency with political appointees who used to work for the industries they would be regulating. In April 2018, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt proposed a rule based on the “secret science” plan, and Horner’s wildest dreams of dismantling environmental and health regulations were set to become reality.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), speaks to members of the media after signing the Affordable Clean Energy Rule at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, June 19, 2019. President Donald Trump is scaling back sweeping Obama-era curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning coal, his biggest step yet to fulfill his campaign promise to stop a "war" on the fossil fuel. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesEPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, center, speaks to members of the media at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on June 19, 2019. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The war on cancer was meant to help banish a disease that by 1970 had become the second-leading cause of death in the United States</b>. The Environmental Protection Agency, created that year, was part of the government’s assault on the rising tide of cancer cases. For some contaminants, such as asbestos and chemicals used in dye-making, the link to cancer was already clear. Scientists were beginning to understand that even tiny amounts of certain chemicals could alter cells, setting off a series of mutations that grow into cancerous tumors. The hope was that the agency could counter increasing cancer rates by limiting environmental exposures.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>Yet 50 years after the federal government took up arms against cancer, the disease is still the second-leading cause of death.</b> Even though cigarette smoking, the leading cause of cancer in the 1970s, has declined sharply, the American cancer rate has actually gone up over the past 40 years. Among children, who are particularly vulnerable to environmental exposures, the cancer rate has risen dramatically, increasing nearly 50 percent since 1975</span>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>During that time, environmental exposures have been mounting. More than 140,000 chemicals and pesticides have been introduced since 1950. Even though the vast majority have not been evaluated for safety, 5,000 of them are made in such great quantities practically everyone is exposed to them. Yet most of the government spending on cancer has remained focused on treating the disease rather than preventing cancer by limiting exposure to carcinogens, such as pesticides and other environmental contaminants.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">graf:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Left/Top: <b>Federal political contributions by members of the American Chemistry Council, </b>including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight. Right/Bottom: Federal political lobbying expenditures by members of the American Chemistry Council, including parent companies and individual employees, 2008 - 2019. Compiled for The Intercept by MapLight.Graphics: Soohee Cho/The Intercept</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);"><b>Since the first major law that attempted to regulate toxic chemicals passed in 1976, chemical companies have spent billions of dollars on lobbying</b>. The member companies of the American Chemistry Council have spent more than $1.4 billion on lobbying and $77.8 million on political contributions since 2008, according to an analysis by MapLight for this story. The ACC by itself has spent $103 million on lobbying. Though staggering, these numbers are a small fraction of the trillions generated by chemical sales over that same period.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Throughout its 50-year existence, the EPA has faced the daunting task of regulating industries that are far better resourced than the agency</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);"> But the effort to rein in powerful companies, which has been met with varying degrees of success under previous administrations, has been largely abandoned under Trump. The EPA, now headed by a former coal lobbyist and run by other former lobbyists, executives, and lawyers from polluting industries, has set about undoing health protections, some of which were specifically designed to prevent cancer.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump, who recently tried to take credit for a 2017 dip in cancer mortality rates and announced that he would be “curing childhood cancer very shortly,” at a rally in Cincinnati last August, presumably isn’t interested in actively causing disease and death. But his eagerness to please the polluting chemical and fossil fuel industries that support him comes at the expense of American lives</b>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Mess in Texas</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For ethylene oxide, the chemical that Ramirez was exposed to, the road to deregulation passes through Texas. It was there, in the summer of 2018, that regulators led by state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt began working with the producers of ethylene oxide on their own standard for the chemical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Honeycutt, who has overseen chemical assessment for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality since 1996, is known for his extremely industry-friendly approach to chemicals</b>. Until this administration, Honeycutt made his name fighting the EPA, challenging the limits the agency tried to place on emissions of chemicals, particularly those released by the oil and gas industry. He has argued that particulate air pollution, which causes lung cancer and other diseases, can help people live longer. And working with his longtime colleague and fellow toxicologist Michael Dourson, Honeycutt loosened state protections on dozens of chemicals — rollbacks that were encouraged and welcomed by chemical manufacturers. Now, under Trump, Honeycutt’s Texas agency has essentially become a shadow EPA and he has assumed a national role in cancer policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The assessment of ethylene oxide that Honeycutt oversaw and the TCEQ released last year no doubt pleased the companies that make the chemical — not least because it appears to have been written by them. In June 2018, before issuing a new safety limit for ethylene oxide, Honeycutt and members of the TCEQ’s toxicology staff met in Austin with Joanna Klapacz, a toxicologist from Dow; Bill Gulledge, a senior director at the American Chemistry Council; and three scientists from Exponent, a consulting company paid by the ACC to help fend off regulation of the chemical, among them two toxicologists named Abby Li and M. Jane Teta. Representatives of Shell, BASF, and Balchem, which together with Dow released more than 200,000 pounds of ethylene oxide over the previous six years, joined the conversation by phone, according to emails of TCEQ staff released in response to a FOIA from the Sierra Club.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr. Mike Honeycutt is an Air Toxicologist for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the world's second largest environmental agency. RALPH BARRERA/ AMERICAN-STATESMANTexas state toxicologist Michael Honeycutt. Photo: Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the meeting, a presentation from the American Chemistry Council recommended adopting estimates of safety thresholds from a paper written by Ciriaco Valdez-Flores, a Texas-based consultant who received funding from both the ACC and the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association. The TCEQ had considered — and rejected — the paper in an assessment of ethylene oxide it released less than two years earlier because, it said, Valdez-Flores hadn’t captured all the cancer risk from ethylene oxide. Although an EPA summary of the 2016 IRIS report on ethylene oxide characterized its confidence in the <b>breast cancer data as “particularly high</b>,” and noted that the breast cancer component “is based on over 200 incident cases for which the investigators also had information on other potential breast cancer risk factors,” the Valdez-Flores paper didn’t include the breast cancer studies in its evaluation. And in a presentation to the group, Teta also argued against the inclusion of the breast cancer data.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Gulledge, who manages the ACC’s panel on ethylene oxide, emailed TCEQ toxicologist Jessica Myers after the meeting and offered to draft the assessment of the chemical for the state agency. “Thank you for hosting us this week,” Gulledge wrote. “We are working on several ‘white papers’ on the risk assessment modeling and our alternative approach that should be ready in the next month or so with the goal to have a draft risk assessment manuscript ready shortly thereafter.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Asked about the email, Tom Flanagin, director of product communications for the American Chemistry Council, denied that the group drafted the risk assessment for the TCEQ.</b> “Mr. Gulledge is referring to a separate, independent effort … for publication in a peer reviewed journal. TCEQ acted independently in preparing their risk assessment.” Flanagin did not explain why Gulledge would be communicating with TCEQ about a purportedly separate, independent effort. Ryan Vise, director of external relations for the TCEQ, also denied that the ACC drafted or edited the state agency’s assessment. Exponent did not respond to requests for comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Yet the proposed ethylene oxide standard that TCEQ released this summer included many of the elements that the ACC and its scientific consultants recommended at the Texas meeting. The state agency omitted the breast cancer studies and adopted the paper by Valdez-Flores as its key study, just as the industry scientists had recommended.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And minutes from a meeting of the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association held the next month also indicate that the chemical industry, led by Teta and Li, who were both at the Texas meeting, drafted the state’s assessment of the chemical. According to the minutes, first reported by the Chicago Tribune, the assessment, which would provide an alternative to the IRIS ethylene oxide value, was funded and led by the industry groups. “Jane Teta and Abby Li (Exponent) will be leading” the recasting of the assessment to the industry’s liking, the minutes explained, and “TCEQ has indicated its receptiveness to considering an alternative to the IRIS value.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The result of this collaboration between the ethylene oxide industry and Texas was a proposed standard that was 3,500 times weaker than the IRIS threshold. </span>The Texas number was also 50 times less protective than the standard the state had released only two years earlier. While Texas offered no scientific reason for weakening its 2017 standard, regulatory developments can help explain the oddly timed reassessment: the EPA’s recognition of ethylene oxide as a carcinogen in 2018 had led to public pressure on companies that emit the gas, which had in turn led to the industry group to ask the TCEQ to issue an alternate standard.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Just as the ACC has done, the Texas agency also attempted to justify its new number by arguing that IRIS’s calculations couldn’t be correct because the body produces some ethylene oxide on its own — an idea dismissed by scientists who are not supported by the ethylene oxide industry.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They make a big deal of endogenous exposure and say that’s why EPA numbers can’t be meaningful,” said Jennifer Jinot, a toxicologist who worked for EPA for 26 years, 12 of which she spent working on the IRIS assessment of ethylene oxide. Jinot described the TCEQ’s focus on purportedly natural levels of the chemical as “disingenuous” and said it was just one of several tricks the state agency used to make the chemical appear safer than it actually is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“Texas has done something completely unreasonable,” said Jinot. “They’re just low-balling the whole thing.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">In an emailed response to questions, Dow spokesperson Ashley Mendoza acknowledged that Joanna Klapacz attended the 2018 meeting at TCEQ, but noted that “she was not part of the technical presentation.</span>” The email also said that “Dow has continued to improve our [ethylene oxide] emission reduction as part of our own sustainability goals. As science advances, our ongoing collaboration with other manufacturers and multiple agencies continues to ensure maximum human safety while delivering products consumers want and need.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The TCEQ responded to questions for this piece with an email saying that its assessment of ethylene oxide was “on the side of the best available science.” The email also said that the more protective ethylene oxide standard, which the state agency issued in March 2017, was never intended to be permanent, but instead was “to be used until a thorough multi-year systematic review and dose-response assessment could be conducted under the extensive TCEQ toxicity factor guidelines.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The proposed safety level could have a dramatic effect on people in Texas</b>, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">where at least 27 facilities emit more than 48 tons of ethylene oxide every year. At one of these facilities, a Huntsman Petrochemical Plant in Conroe Texas, the EPA estimated the cancer risk due to the release of ethylene oxide and other chemicals to be <b>3,000 in a million, according to a risk assessment report the agency released in December. Nationwide, the average risk of cancer from air pollution is 32 in a million.</b></span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Texas standard could also weaken protections for people far beyond Texas, since states often consider one another’s regulations when issuing their own. “It could mess with the legal landscape globally,” said Tracey Woodruff, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco school of medicine who studies how chemical exposures affect health. “Even if other states don’t adopt Texas’ levels, they tend to average them.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019. Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s plant can be seen just beyond homes in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>While Honeycutt was once one of EPA’s main opponents, the Trump administration is now relying on his agency’s industry-biased assessment of ethylene oxide to guide the federal government’s approach to the carcinogen. </b>IRIS spent years calculating its safety threshold for ethylene oxide and noted in its 2016 report that scientists have been studying the chemical’s “DNA-damaging properties” since the 1940s. Yet in early November, the EPA indicated it would not be calling for the reduction of emissions as much as the IRIS report would suggest is necessary. Instead, the EPA’s proposed rule, which it is required to finalize by March, calculated risk levels that were six to nine times weaker than those issued in 2016. An explanatory document released by EPA cited the Texas estimate as well as the request for correction from the American Chemistry Council and attributed its decision to change its safety level to “uncertainties” in the science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The people who will be affected by the weakening of ethylene oxide protections are disproportionately poor and nonwhite</b>, as the EPA’s own analysis shows. While the U.S. population overall is 12 percent African American, the areas with elevated cancer risks due to ethylene oxide are 21 percent African American, according to the document the agency released in November. Latinos are also at greater risk of exposure, making up 18 percent of the U.S. population and 31 percent of those living in areas with elevated cancer risk due to the chemical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those demographics aren’t unusual. While black and Latino people produce less pollution, people of color have a higher burden of pollution and are more likely to live near industrial facilities. Penny Dryden, who grew up near several polluting plants in the Rosegate section of Wilmington, Delaware, was for years unaware of the disparity. Dryden, 62, has had cancer three times. The first, breast cancer, was diagnosed when she was just 19. But this seemed to be a fact of life in her mostly African American neighborhood. Many of her friends and relatives as well as both of her parents had cancer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2018, a facility near Dryden’s home that makes chemicals used in antifreeze and some processed foods released so much ethylene oxide into the air that the nearby Delaware Bridge had to be temporarily shut down. That was a temporary inconvenience to commuters, but for people who live within a three-mile radius of the plant — 52 percent of whom are people of color, and 31 percent of whom are below the poverty level — the chemical poses an ongoing health threat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although the cancers have taken a toll, Dryden still considers herself lucky. “Lots of people here have died of it, whole families, so many of my friends,” said Dryden, who has come to recognize and fight against the extra burden of both pollution and disease that are clustered in several communities of color in Delaware. And while she has no experience living in a pollution-free area, she feels certain the people making decisions that affect pollution levels around the country have no idea how it feels to live with polluted air. “The people in D.C. don’t go into communities like ours,” said Dryden. “They probably have never heard of Rosegate.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For people like Dryden and Ramirez, who live near the facilities around the country — more than 100 — that emit the carcinogenic gas, the weakening of the ethylene oxide standard will result in even greater risks of cancer. “By undermining the way risk assessments are done, Texas has allowed these plants to put out more pollution because it’ll look like it’s safe when it’s not,” said Woodruff, the reproductive health professor. “They’re resetting the bar to allow more pollution going out into the world.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Children will also disproportionately bear the burden of this additional pollution</b>. As the EPA has pointed out, children may also be especially vulnerable to the mutagenic effects of ethylene oxide — as they are for other carcinogens. Simon Strong came to recognize kids’ particular vulnerability after his son, Oliver, died suddenly in June 2015. An exuberant 12-year-old who played saxophone and tended goal for his soccer team, Oliver was diagnosed with leukemia a week after he complained of his first symptom: a headache. He died just 36 hours later, leaving his parents bereft and filled with questions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oliver-1578521871Oliver Strong. Photo: Courtesy of Simon Strong]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We were there with his oncologist in floods of tears, and I said, ‘What caused this?’ and she just burst out, ‘It’s the environment,’” Strong remembered recently. He had no idea what she meant and had never thought much about cancer before Oliver’s illness. But after his son’s death, Strong, a reporter turned investigator, began researching the causes of pediatric cancer. He read with dismay about the alarming numbers of soccer players, particularly goalies, who have developed cancer; about the connection between cancer and Roundup, a weed killer he had used liberally in the family’s backyard in Florida; and about several pediatric cancer clusters in his home state.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The problem, as he learned, was also worsening. While pediatric cancer rates were increasing overall, there had been a particularly large jump in the number of cases in infants and children under 5. Yet the government seemed to be doing little to understand what was causing these cancers or to prevent them.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So Strong launched a project along with the Baylor College of Medicine to collect information about the environmental exposures of children with cancer from their families. It’s work he wishes the federal government was doing. But as Strong’s urgency about the problem was growing, the Trump administration was going in the opposite direction, unraveling the little work that was being done on the issue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Indeed, in May, the EPA decided to pull its funding for a network of centers that had researched the effects of various substances, including chemicals, on children</span>. <b>One of those research hubs, the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment at Berkeley, had found that exposure to pesticides, traffic emissions, tobacco smoke, and solvents are associated with childhood leukemia, the most common children’s cancer</b>. Staff there were continuing to research the environmental causes of the disease and to educate parents and physicians, according to the physician and epidemiologist who directs the center, Catherine Metayer. “There is still so much work to do,” said Metayer. But the center lost the $1.5 million per year it had been receiving from the EPA and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Barring intervention from Congress, the last of its federal money will be spent by this summer. “After that, our work will have to stop,” she said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Known Killers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">The closure of the pediatric environmental health centers is only one of many backward steps we’ve taken in our decades-long battle against cancer and cancer-causing exposures. The first major one came after the EPA attempted to use the <b>Toxic Substances Control Act to ban asbestos in 1989</b>. The ban was exactly what the EPA and the chemicals law were created to do: protect Americans from a substance that had been known for decades to cause cancer. But after the agency began the process, asbestos mining and manufacturing companies sued. <b>A court struck down most of the government’s ban in 1991 and, since then, the agency has been wary of taking on regulatory battles it might not win. As a result, the EPA has not regulated a single chemical under the law in the almost 30 years after the 1991 ruling</b></span><b>.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>So, while 67 countries have already banned asbestos, we’re still importing it. And last year, the Trump EPA decided — against the advice of its own scientists — to continue to allow its use.&nbsp;</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a statement, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency “along with our state partners, is covering ALL bases under our legal authority to protect people’s health from asbestos exposure.” The spokesperson went on to explain an April 2019 rule that allows the agency to restrict or prohibit the use of products containing <b>asbestos. But she declined to say why the EPA had chosen not to ban the substance altogether, as its own scientists and attorneys had recommended.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>While the continued use of asbestos has deadly consequences, causing an estimated 39,000 deaths in the U.S</b>. each year, it is just one of the chemicals the Trump administration is now in a position to greenlight. In 2016, Congress tried to improve our abysmal record on chemicals by fixing the broken Toxic Substances Control Act. The update of the law aimed to bring about greater protections by requiring the EPA to identify and restrict the most dangerous substances.<b> But under Trump, the opposite is happening </b>— and the opportunity to fix chemical regulation, 40 years in the making, has instead turned into another massive step backward. The assessment process, begun in the Obama era, is being carried out by an administration that is friendlier to the chemical industry than any other administration in history.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“<b>There is no daylight between this EPA and what the big chemical companies want,</b>” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of the federal toxics program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“Whatever the term is for government by corporation, that’s what we’ve been living under for three years.</span>” Lots of small decisions are involved in implementing the new law, including the choice of which chemicals to assess, what sources of information about them to use, and how to quantify the risks they pose. “And these details are all essentially being worked out by companies like Dow and DuPont and Chemours,” said Rosenberg. “It’s the worst-case scenario.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asbestos is now one of 10 compounds the EPA began assessing in 2016 under the new law. In August, the EPA announced that it was considering assessing an additional 20 chemicals and added another five in September. How these chemicals are assessed will affect Americans’ exposure levels and ultimately their risks for a range of health outcomes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow Chemical’s Freeport plant is the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Having the Trump administration at the helm during a once-in-a-generation reassessment of toxic pollutants is especially disastrous for the effort to protect Americans from cancer.</b> Of the 35 chemicals the EPA is now scrutinizing under the updated TSCA, 19 are widely considered by researchers to be carcinogenic. While only a tiny exposure can set off disease, more than 135 million pounds of these carcinogens were released in this country between 2014 and 2018, according to the most recent data from the EPA. And how dangerous they are found to be may ultimately impact federal and state limits on their use.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Obama administration officials were scrupulous when they began the assessment process back in 2016</b>. “They clearly said we have to look at all the ways people are exposed because if we ignore even a single pathway, that can result in the difference between acceptable and unacceptable risk,” said Eve Gartner, an attorney who directs the toxics program at Earthjustice. But when Trump appointees came in to replace them at the EPA, that changed. Nancy Beck, who had been trying to convince the EPA to narrow the range of exposures it considered in chemical assessments when she was director of regulatory policy for the American Chemistry Council, joined the EPA in April 2017 and remade the rule exactly as industry wanted it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just as the environmental advocates feared, the first of the assessments under Beck’s rule, which were released over the past several months and will likely be finalized within the coming year, have minimized the risks posed by chemicals. “We’re seeing massive exclusions of known pathways for exposure,” said Gartner. “<b>EPA is finding that chemicals that are universally understood to present massive risk are fine.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><b>Environmental groups, including Earthjustice, NRDC, and the Environmental Defense Fund, sued the EPA</b>, arguing that the agency was wrong to rule out certain pathways of chemical exposures. In November, a federal appeals court agreed with them. If the ruling stands, EPA will be forced to consider exposures to chemicals through uses that have been phased out, which will affect the assessment of asbestos, for example, and<b> PFOA, an industrial contaminant found in drinking water, even though the chemical is no longer used in the U.S.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Excluding consideration of certain exposures is just one of the ways industry insiders at the EPA appear to be underestimating the harms of toxic substances. “The specifics vary from one chemical to another, but by ignoring certain evidence, EPA uses the risk assessment process to put its thumb on the scales and come out with a result that is weaker and less health protective than it would otherwise be,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Each time we see one of these assessments, there are ways in which the science has been played with.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Denison pointed to the EPA’s recent handling of a likely carcinogen called <b>1,4-dioxane</b>, which is used to make other chemicals and forms spontaneously in some shampoos, cosmetics, and cleaning products. In 2013, IRIS set a safety threshold for the chemical based, in part, on studies showing that female mice exposed to it developed cancerous tumors in their livers. Yet when the EPA released its draft risk assessment of 1,4-dioxane under the new TSCA law in June, “they conveniently omitted those tumors,” said Denison. “They removed the most sensitive endpoint and as a result came up with five-fold less protective risk value.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Another dishonest technique the EPA has used to deem chemicals safe is to change safety thresholds when chemicals don’t meet them.</b> Although the 1963 Clean Air Act mandated that the lifetime cancer risk to an average individual should be no greater than 1 in a million, since 2008 the agency has used a much less protective risk standard for carcinogens in the air: 1 in 10,000. NRDC sued in an effort to get the EPA under George W. Bush to stick with the more protective number, but a three-judge panel that included Brett Kavanaugh ruled against the environmental group in 2008. “They gutted the law and set the course for the next two decades,” said John Walke, the NRDC attorney who argued the case. When testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, Kavanaugh lied about the case, describing it as one in which he’d ruled for environmentalists.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Although previous administrations have used the 1-in-a-million standard when evaluating the safety of toxic chemicals, the Trump administration recently began using the 1-in-10,000 standard, </span>Denison said. In several recent reports issued under the updated chemicals law, including a draft assessment of the deadly paint stripper methylene chloride, the EPA inexplicably used this lower bar for determining when a cancer rate for workers is unacceptable. <b>“It looks to me like some scientists were doing the number-crunching, and somebody came up and said, ‘Yikes, look at all this risk. How do we make it go away?’” said Denison.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA insists that it “is following the legal process in TSCA, which ensures that our risk evaluations are transparent and include a robust review of the available science,” according to an emailed statement from an EPA spokesperson. The statement also said, “The draft risk evaluations released so far represent the agency’s preliminary conclusions on these chemicals. EPA goes beyond what TSCA requires by peer reviewing the risk evaluations it releases in order to increase public transparency in the risk evaluation process and receive expert feedback on the science that underlies the risk determinations. If EPA’s final risk evaluations find there are unreasonable risks associated with these chemicals, the agency will propose actions to address those risks within the timeframe required by TSCA.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scenes from Freeport, Texas on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Dow’s Freeport facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A Polluter’s Paradise</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>There may be no better place to see the consequences of the unraveling of chemical regulation than in Texas. </b>Home to roughly two-thirds of the nation’s petrochemical industry and a fast-growing number of factories that make plastic and its feedstocks, Texas is a hub for the production of carcinogenic compounds as well as a leader in the movement to weaken regulations of them. For years, Texas has been a polluter’s paradise. As the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries have exploded throughout the state, the TCEQ’s Honeycutt has presided over an easing of restrictions on their emissions even as his staff has been reduced.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>With 1.7 million new cases estimated for 2019 in the United States, cancer is a particular problem in Freeport, Texas. </b>Rates of Hodgkin lymphoma are elevated in this small town on the Gulf Coast, as are cancers of the liver and bile duct, lung, stomach, and nasal cavity and middle ear, according to a report that the Texas Department of State Health Services quietly released in 2018.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The report makes no mention of pollution as a possible cause of the elevated number of cancer cases, yet Freeport is home to the largest chemical production facility in the western hemisphere</b>: 12,800 acres of holding tanks, machinery, canals, deep-water ports, and pipelines, owned by Dow. Alongside it are chemical production facilities owned by other companies, including BASF, Shintech, Huntsman, and the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Olin Corporation, the largest chlor-alkali producer in the world, </span>which bought part of its Freeport manufacturing site from Dow in 2015.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Dow’s Freeport plant produces more than 40 billion pounds of chemicals and other products, including the components of much of the world’s plastics.</b> In the process, the plant emits hundreds of toxic chemicals. The facility released more than 200 air pollutants in 2017 and has violated its permits in every quarter of the past three years, making it a high-priority violator of the Clean Air Act. Between 2015 and 2018, the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">complex emitted more than 3 million pounds of unpermitted air pollution on top of what it was allowed to release</span>, according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cancer-2-08-1578686568On-site manufacturing releases of 18 of the 19 carcinogens currently being reviewed by the EPA under the revised 2016 Toxic Substances Control Act. All data drawn from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, 2014 – 2018, as reported by manufacturers. Locations include facilities within 50 miles. Data does not include releases at waste disposal/recycling facilities or on-site underground injection wells. Graphic: Soohee Cho/The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Among the pollutants being released by Dow in Freeport are 11 carcinogens that are now being assessed or considered for assessment by the EPA under the new toxic chemicals law,</b> according to EPA data. Of those chemicals, five have been shown to increase levels of the very cancers that are elevated in Freeport. Over the past five years, the Dow plant released more than 221,000 pounds of these five chemicals, including 1,2-dichloropropane, which causes bile duct cancer and is a probable cause of cancer of the nasal cavity and inner ear; 1,3-butadiene, which has been shown to increase rates of stomach cancers (and was recently released in an explosion at another chemical plant on the Texas coast); 1,1,2-trichloroethane and 1,1-dichloroethane, both of which have been linked to liver cancer in mice; and 1,2-dichloroethane, a probable carcinogen that has been linked to stomach, liver, and lung cancers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">But initial reports that the EPA recently released on the chemicals it’s investigating omit information that the agency has in its own databases about where and in what quantities these chemicals are produced, which companies make them, and how they’re used. As a result, most people in Freeport — and other polluted communities — do not realize that the industrial facilities near them are releasing dangerous amounts of these carcinogens. Also, because they omit this critical information, the assessments themselves may not reflect the true dangers posed by these substan</span>ces.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Dow has done little to address the prevalence of cancer in the area, though the company did sponsor a “Sparkles and Spurs” fundraiser in 2018 to help buy a CT scanner for the CHI St. Luke’s Health cance</b>r center in Brazosport, Texas, which is just a 15-minute drive from the Dow Chemical plant. Some residents call it the “Dow Cancer Center” because it was built on land donated by the giant chemical company. The evening of food, fun, and “foot stompin’” country music helped the center purchase the CT scanner, which the hospital is still using to diagnose new cancer cases.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Although they are more likely to get certain cancers, residents of Freeport — where the median household income is less than $37,000 a year — may have a difficult time getting care at the local hospital. “The Dow cancer center won’t take indigent patients,</b>” said Melanie Oldham, a Freeport resident and physical therapist who said that she has worked with hundreds of clients in the area who have had cancer. “People who don’t have good insurance end up having to drive back and forth to either Galveston or to MD Anderson, which is an hour away.” Many of them are workers at the Dow plant, according to Oldham. “These are great jobs until you’re 50 or so,” she said. “That’s when a lot of my patients develop cancer.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Physical therapist, Melanie Oldham, in her Freeport, Texas home, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Physical therapist Melanie Oldham at her home in Freeport, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Oldham pushed for years to get the state to conduct the cancer incidence study it released in 2018. The results confirmed her hunch that cancer rates in Freeport continued to exceed state and national rates. But the vindication brought no relief. “Dow could prevent a lot of these cancers,” said Oldham, “but instead it’s ‘Let’s put money into the local cancer center.’ It’s all about PR for them.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The CHI St. Luke’s Health-Brazosport Hospital emailed a statement in response to inquiries from The Intercept saying, “CHI St. Luke’s Health is committed to serving all in our community including the poor and vulnerable. We have a consistent stewardship policy across our division that outlines our process for caring for underserved and vulnerable patients who can’t afford healthcare services.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Texas Department of State Health Services said it has not investigated the environmental causes of the increased number of cancer cases in Freeport.</b> “Our protocol is to continue to monitor the situation and re-evaluate as more data becomes available,” department spokesperson Chris Van Deusen wrote in an email to The Intercept. In a separate email, Van Deusen wrote that the health department could not provide any earlier reports on cancer rates in Freeport because it doesn’t retain them after four years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Clarence Thompson, cancer came as no surprise. Many of the people he worked with at the Dow plant in Freeport have already died of the disease. Thompson, who was employed by a company that contracted with Dow, did pipe-fitting, welding, and machine operation at the Texas plant for more than 25 years and worked there when a cluster of brain cancer cases was identified among workers. Back then Thompson was in near constant motion, according to Eve Thompson, his wife of 43 years. “Even when he’d come in from work, he’d keep working, mow the yard, or tinker with something,” she recently recalled. “I did not marry a lazy man.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clarence Thompson stands outside of his Brazoria, Texas home assisted by a walking stick, on Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Clarence Thompson stands outside of his home in Brazoria, Texas, assisted by a walking stick, on Dec. 18, 2019. Photo: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The front yard of Clarence Thompson’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.Willie Leona Willow applies lotion to her father, Clarence Thompson’s face prior to going outside, at Clarence’s home in Brazoria, Texas, Wednesday, December 18th, 2019.Todd Spoth for The Intercept.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Left/Top: The front yard of the Thompson’s home in Brazoria. Right/Bottom: Thompson's daughter, Willie Leona Willow, applies lotion to her father's face prior to going outside.Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At 68, Thompson still wants to work, but these days he can barely walk. He has trouble remembering things and difficulty eating, and suffers from near constant pain in his lower back. At first Thompson thought his symptoms were just part of growing older. But Eve suspected that something was wrong. And when she took him to a doctor in June, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells. In the months since, Thompson, who is almost 6 feet tall, has lost 50 pounds and has been hospitalized with several life-threatening infections. <b>Thompson said he was exposed to several carcinogens while working at the Dow plant, including ethylene oxide and asbestos, both of which have been linked to multiple myeloma.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet even as his vitality is draining away, Thompson worries about the dangers that chemicals from the plant may pose both to other workers and neighbors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Residents of Freeport are not the only people living dangerously near facilities that emit the carcinogenic chemicals now under scrutiny from the EPA. An analysis performed for this story by Material Research, an environmental data analysis company, shows that the chemicals are being released in particularly large quantities in eight hubs for th<b>e production and disposal of plastic. Among the most polluted hotspots are industrial areas in Lake Charles and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Port Arthur and Houston, Texas; El Dorado, Arkansas; and Louisville and Calvert City, Kentucky.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many people living in these highly polluted communities don’t know what chemicals they’re breathing, let alone the dangers they present, according to Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant who has worked in all of these hotspots. “But when you go there and say these are the chemicals and these are their known human health impacts, people start saying Oh, I have that, I have that, and I have that,” said Subra. “Most of those facilities have been there two or three generations and people are able to tell you not just what cancers they have but what cancers their parents and aunts and uncles had.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More Leukemia, Please</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">While some carcinogenic chemicals that have already gone through the IRIS process are getting a more forgiving assessment through TSCA, the EPA is also refusing to release one IRIS report — on formaldehyde — even as it performs a new assessment of the chemical</span>. Formaldehyde, used in building materials, glue insulation, and fabric, has been widely recognized as a cause of leukemia. In 2018, IRIS’s assessment of the chemical, which was expected to confirm the link to the blood cancer, <b>was ready for “imminent release,” as then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told the Senate.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Formaldehyde already accounts for more than half the nationwide cancer risk from air pollution.</b> Because it’s so widespread — more than 93 million pounds have been released in the U.S. since 2014 — and because its safety threshold is now 30 years old and evidence of its carcinogenicity has mounted during that time, updating the number IRIS calculated would likely increase the official cancer risk in many places around the country and drive up the number of census tracts where the cancer rate is officially problematic. But in April, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler announced that the agency would not be releasing the IRIS report on the chemical, which had been in the works for more than a decade.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The IRIS assessment was one of 11 the agency withheld from publication, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office</b>. (In its statement, the EPA described these reports as “reduced from the IRIS workflow.”) Wheeler said that the EPA would instead assess formaldehyde through the new toxic chemicals law, thus indefinitely delaying the bad news about formaldehyde and cancer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">It’s worth noting that the Trump appointee who now heads the EPA’s Office of Research Development where IRIS assessments are produced, <b>David Dunlap, used to work for Koch Industries. Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, a subsidiary of Koch, is one of the country’s largest producers of formaldehyde</b>. Before working for Koch, Dunlap handled regulation for the Chlorine Institute, a trade group to which Dow and Olin belong. Dunlap also served on the ACC’s formaldehyde panel, which has disputed the link between the chemical and leukemia. <b>Nancy Beck, the political appointee at the EPA who rewrote the rule determining how the agency would assess chemicals, also worked for the ACC. And David Fischer,</b> the person who replaced her at the agency after she left this summer, is an ACC alum as well, having spent a decade working there on the TSCA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Honeycutt, who gave the keynote address at the ACC’s “premier” regulatory conference in 2018,</b> also has strong ties to the trade group. Even though he remains in Texas, Honeycutt has had an outsized impact on chemical policy beyond the state and is in close touch with EPA staff. Before the TCEQ publicly released its ethylene oxide assessment, <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Honeycutt sent it to Anne Idsal, a former TCEQ employee who is now running the EPA’s Air Office,</span> <b>which is steering the agency’s policy on ethylene oxide. A Texan with close ties to the oil and gas industry, Idsal’s father owned the ranch where Dick Cheney shot a Texas attorney while hunting quail.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Honeycutt also emailed an explanation of the assessment to Erin Chancellor, another former TCEQ employee who now heads the EPA’s regional office in Texas</b>, telling her to “hold it close.” Texas’s top toxicologist may have written about ethylene oxide to other EPA staff and industry representatives, but the Texas agency has refused to provide some documents in response to a<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Sierra Club public records request specifically asking for communications between TCEQ staff and a long list of interested parties, including the American Petroleum Institute, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, Chevron Phillips, Exxon Mobil, Formosa, Georgia-Pacific, and Dow/DuPont</span>. In September, after the Sierra Club pushed to get the documents the TCEQ had withheld, the attorney general of Texas ruled in its favor. <b>In response, the TCEQ took the unusual step of suing the attorney general rather than complying with the decision. That case is now pending.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asked about Honeycutt’s emails to Idsal and Chancellor, the TCEQ’s spokesperson wrote in an email that “TCEQ routinely interacts and share information with EPA.” His email also said that the state attorney general didn’t rule on whether certain documents “fall within exceptions to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act” and that the only way to get him to address the question was to sue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Meanwhile, Honeycutt is also making changes that will affect how all cancer-causing chemicals are treated throughout the country.</b> In 2017, then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt named Honeycutt <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">chair of the agency’s influential Science Advisory Board</span>. The group is supposed to provide scientific advice to the administrator, but under Trump it has been stacked with industry apologists. This summer, Honeycutt, along with fellow advisory board members from Dow Chemical, Exxon Mobil, and the American Chemistry Council, quietly began proposing profound and lasting changes to the EPA’s cancer guidelines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Throughout the EPA’s almost 50-year history, the agency has held that there is no safe level of a carcinogen. But Honeycutt and his colleagues on the advisory board have proposed reversing that assumption. “They want to flip it so there can be safe levels of cancer-causing chemicals,”</b> said Jen Sass, a senior scientist at NRDC, who sees the move as a ruse for allowing companies to freely release pollutants. “Their presumption is that low levels of carcinogens aren’t harmful and might even be good for you. And industry wants to define low level as whatever level you’re exposed to.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an emailed response to questions about the cancer guidelines, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “The EPA is currently considering the SAB member’s individual comments as well as those provided by the public as they consider next steps for this project.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Because the nation’s cancer guidelines are rewritten very infrequently — the most recent version was published in 2005 — Sass fears that the new ones will have an enduring impact. “Guidances like this last for decades,” she said. “I don’t know how this could be undone later.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[A white substance resembling steam billows out of Vantage's factory in Gurnee, Ill. on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide, a gas known to cause cancer. Pat Nabong for The Intercept.Steam billows out of Vantage’s factory in Gurnee, Ill., on Jan. 2, 2020. Vantage is one of the factories in Lake County that emits ethylene oxide. Photo: Pat Nabong for The Intercept]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Making America Sick Again</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Other hard-to-reverse plans that could result in increased cancers rates throughout the country are also quietly moving ahead. On December 31, the deregulatory dream of tobacco industry attorney Christopher Horner took another step closer to becoming national policy.</span> <b>While Trump was preparing to ring in the new year at Mar-a-Lago with Rudy Giuliani, Honeycutt released an analysis of the proposed secret science rule — now rebranded “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” — on behalf of the EPA’s science advisory board. </b>The EPA now has to answer several questions the board posed in that document. <b>Once it is finalized, the rule will have to undergo a 60-day comment period. But after that, the once pie-in-the-sky scheme is likely to become the law of the land.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">If and when it does get finalized and survives the legal challenges it will certainly face, the secret science rule will be even more crippling to health-based regulations than Horner first envisioned.</span> His original idea was to require that studies used to make regulatory decisions be reproducible — which sounds fine in theory until you understand that they are often based on confidential private health data of thousands of individuals. And an earlier version of the EPA’s proposed rule called for placing these restrictions only on certain studies. But the EPA amended the proposal last year to require that all raw data and models underlying regulatory decisions be made available for reanalysis, with exceptions possible only on the administrator’s whim.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The requirement would mean that even science that was used to guide past regulations may be up for grabs</b>. The EPA’s 2016 ethylene oxide assessment was partially based on breast cancer incidence data that contained confidential personal information, so under the proposed secret science rule that data could be ruled illegitimate. The rule could also undercut the utility of all the data that Simon Strong is collecting in honor of his son. Because that information will be collected in accordance with standard privacy protocols, it wouldn’t be considered in regulatory decision-making.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">And the EPA could be prevented from basing any regulation on studies of cancer clusters like the one near the Dow plant in Freeport, Texas. “The way you show a cluster is to go to a community and enter their confidential health information and compare that to other areas,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of dozens of groups that oppose the proposed rule. “But you wouldn’t be able to release that raw data because it’s confidential.</span>”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The rule could render other groundbreaking science useless for protecting public health, too, such as studies showing the link between air pollution and lung cancer, between smoking and various cancers, or between the industrial contaminant PFOA and testicular and kidney cancer.</b> The change would mark a profound shift both for the U.S. government and for the American people. “It’s saying what’s important is no longer the public interest but the industrial interest,” said Rosenberg. “Cancer is the most obvious and feared sign of ignoring public interest. And this will lead to more cancer.”</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-bidens-team-rushed-to-dump-a-trump-era-pfas-assessment/">https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-bidens-team-rushed-to-dump-a-trump-era-pfas-assessment/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How Biden’s team rushed to dump a Trump-era PFAS assessment</b></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>By E.A. Crunden |&nbsp;<b>09/01/2021&nbsp;</b></div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div><b>Trump administration appointees interfered with development of a toxicity assessment for a "forever chemical" and made changes that were "not scientifically sound," documents obtained by E&E News through the Freedom of Information Act show</b>. Claudine Hellmuth/E&E News (illustration); EPA (document); unclelkt/Pixabay (hand)</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Trump-era EPA appointees engaged in "considerable political level interference" on an assessment for a controversial "forever chemical," documents obtained by E&E News indicate.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">But the Biden administration wasted no time in yanking that document, moving to scrub the assessment of alterations made by political appointees and restore language advocated by EPA career scientists shortly after the president’s inauguration.</span></div><div>
</div><div>At issue is a toxicity assessment for PFBS, part of the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances family. PFBS is a replacement chemical for PFOS — one of the two most well-studied and controversial PFAS, due to health risks like cancer. The replacement compound, a surfactant, is used in manufacturing processes and to make stain-resistant coatings for various consumer items like clothes, among other purposes.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shed light on the agency back-and-forth over the toxicity assessment for PFBS, released in the last days of the Trump administration, only to be clawed back as soon as Biden took office</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">&nbsp;Staff conversations show the process of withdrawing and replacing the document came after a contentious publication process that saw significant input from political appointees, in a breach with agency processes.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>In an email sent Jan. 21, shortly after Biden’s inauguration, then-head of EPA’s Office of Research and Development Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta conveyed wishes that the PFBS assessment be removed.</b></div><div>
</div><div>"During the rush of the last administration to complete various tasks, there was a PFAS assessment on PFBS along with an internal deliberative memo from [the EPA chemicals office] that apparently were posted Tuesday," she wrote to Jane Nishida, then-acting EPA administrator, in an email marked with a "high" importance level.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>In January, anonymous EPA staffers raised concerns that the assessment had been politically compromised (Greenwire, Jan. 14).</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As Biden took office, leadership in the research office and the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention immediately requested that the assessment and related documents be taken down at once, Orme-Zavaleta said. "The materials posted are not supported by ORD or OCSPP career scientists and violate the Agency’s scientific integrity policy. We will work to correct the document, brief new leadership then follow up with [the Office of Public Affairs] on the correct release."</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>At the heart of the controversy was a significant shift from a draft assessment, which offered a reference dose — or an indicator of how much individuals can be exposed to a chemical before experiencing adverse health impacts.</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A key component of deriving that reference dose are uncertainty factors, which are applied to reflect data limitations. For the PFBS assessment, uncertainty factors were crucial, given a lack of information around areas like immunotoxicity and mammary gland development. But the new document refuted any database deficiency and shifted the reference dose to a range</span>.</div><div>
</div><div>While the assessment was a science, rather than regulatory, document, critics worried the change would allow for industry and government to cherry pick numbers when setting threshold levels. An EPA spokesperson confirmed to E&E News that the Biden administration "immediately began working with EPA’s career scientists and staff" to withdraw and replace the document.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>Orme-Zavaleta, who recently retired, meanwhile said the document published under Trump reflected "considerable political level interference" and became "a poster child for why it’s critical to have scientific integrity policies in federal governmen</b>t."</div><div>
</div><div>Pushback on a Trump EPA priority</div><div>
</div><div><b>The PFBS assessment was a priority for the Trump administration, and former Deputy Assistant Administrator for Science Policy David Dunlap[kochsucker] highlighted the issue as a major focus.</b></div><div>
</div><div>EPA originally planned to publish the assessment in late October 2020. But the schedule was delayed amid last-minute comments and concerns about the uncertainty factors from the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">A December document reviewed by E&E News showed that Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Deputy&nbsp;<b>Assistant Administrator David Fischer — a former official with the American Chemistry Council, which represents PFAS manufacturers and has lobbied extensively against a crackdown&nbsp;</b>on the chemicals</span>&nbsp;— asked senior toxicologists to review the Office of Research and Development’s PFBS work. Fischer’s office countered ORD’s findings regarding uncertainty factors for chronic and subchronic reference doses.</div><div>
</div><div>Fischer did not respond to a request for comment. But EPA confirmed to E&E News that the process became bogged down by his office’s previous political leadership, in a deviation from regular practices.</div><div>
</div><div><b>In early January, leading up to posting the assessment, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics Deputy Director Tala Henry shared a draft with officials, noting it included proposed in-line edits supporting a range of uncertainty factors.&nbsp;</b>She commented that former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler had requested the inclusion of those edits. Conversations indicate officials sought to publish the assessment in advance of a Wheeler PFAS-centric interview.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Orme-Zavaleta confirmed to E&E News that political leadership decided to modify ORD’s peer-reviewed assessment in keeping with Wheeler’s preferences and that she did not learn of the changes until January. She called the back-and-forth "one of the more infuriating experiences I have ever encountered."</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">Her emails show that she pushed back, arguing Wheeler "did not have complete information" in making his request. The PFBS assessment had previously been considered final.</span></div><div>
</div><div>"The type of changes OCSPP proposes would require us to go through the whole process of intra/inter-agency review [and workgroup efforts] … which will take anywhere from 6-8 months," she said.</div><div>
</div><div><b>But a day later, Wheeler’s senior adviser, Taylor Hoverman, announced the process would move forward. The agency’s political leadership negotiated a<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;fast-tracked review through the Office of Management and Budget that is not typically part of EPA’s processes for toxicity assessments.</span>&nbsp;Soon afterward, EPA published the document.</b></div><div>
</div><div>‘Very unusual’ levels of input</div><div>
</div><div><b>Multiple political appointees kept a close eye on the PFBS assessment process. In one instance, the Department of Defense gave EPA feedback disputing the agency’s approach to uncertainty factors.</b>&nbsp;Former career staff said those comments came as part of an interagency review process and in response to language inserted by Fischer. Emails show Dunlap wound up editing EPA’s response to the Department of Defense, taking an active role in shaping the final product. He continued asking for updates on the status of the assessment as it proceeded.</div><div>
</div><div><b>Orme-Zavaleta said the level of involvement was irregular. "David Dunlap was engaging in the decision making process for PFBS without consulting with or including anyone else from ORD," she said. "I am also not aware of any other [EPA administrator] weighing in on a science decision in an assessment before.</b>"</div><div>
</div><div><b>Betsy Southerland, a former longtime EPA top scientist, said Dunlap’s level of involvement was "very unusual." She said an official at Dunlap’s level would not typically have edited a technical document as he did.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 0);">"[Deputy assistant administrators] certainly keep track of the progress on high-priority projects and ensure work is done on schedule and following all peer-reviewed guidance and standard processes, but rarely if ever rewrite documents since they are generally not subject matter experts," Southerland said.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>Kyla Bennett, who directs science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, meanwhile expressed alarm</b>. The conversations, she said, "prove what we always suspected — Trump Administration political appointees improperly manipulated science at EPA," adding the revelations were "disturbing."</div><div>
</div><div><b>Dunlap did not respond to a request for comment.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Career staff, meanwhile, were unhappy with the changes imposed by political officials. EPA senior science adviser Louis D’Amico voiced harsh criticism in an email sent on Jan. 6.</div><div>
</div><div>"This is precedent setting, and flies completely in the face of legitimate and necessary separation between risk assessment and risk management," he told Orme-Zavaleta and Samantha Jones, the acting associate director for health at EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment.</div><div>
</div><div>"A decision to release a ‘range of values’ in EPA assessments should be discussed across the agency, including program offices and regions."</div><div>
</div><div>Jones agreed in a response email, also taking issue with changes stating that the individual value generated for PFBS would be dependent on "the needs of the program office and in the type of risk assessment being performed," including for the general population.</div><div>
</div><div>That note, Jones said, "should NOT be in a scientific foundational document. It would go into the risk assessment by the program."</div><div>
</div><div>A speedy reversal</div><div>
</div><div>Only a day after Biden took office, EPA staff began the process of taking down the PFBS assessment.</div><div>
</div><div><b>In a Feb. 9 email, EPA science communications specialist Kacey Fitzpatrick linked the issue more clearly to former Administrator Wheeler, saying the changes made to the PFBS assessment were at "political direction" and "not scientifically sound."</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">"Administrator Wheeler determined that uncertainty factors were policy, not scientific judgements. … This is contrary to long-standing risk assessment practices based on National Academy of Sciences (NAS) guidance," Fitzpatrick wrote to Carolyn Hubbard, ORD’s science communications director, in an email laying out the agency’s response. "This constitutes a violation of the agency’s Scientific Integrity Policy and the documents have been removed from the EPA website while the agency completes its review."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The old document was pulled that same day</span>&nbsp;(E&E News PM, Feb. 9).</div><div>
</div><div><b>Two months later, EPA released its replacement — one Orme-Zavaleta said in a statement "fixes errors in the version issued earlier this year, was developed by EPA career scientists, and upholds the values of scientific integrity"&nbsp;</b>(Greenwire, April 8).</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The new assessment set a chronic reference dose of 300 parts per trillion per day, along with a subchronic dose of 1,000 ppt per day. That reference dose is much stricter than the 2018 Trump EPA’s original chronic dose recommendation of 10,000 ppt per day with a subchronic range from 40,000 ppt to 100,000 ppt.</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>That replacement didn’t mark the end of the saga. EPA’s Office of Inspector General said in June that it would probe the agency’s decisionmaking regarding the assessment (Greenwire, June 16). At the time, EPA said it was "committed to upholding scientific integrity" and would support and assist the review.</b></div><div>
</div><div><b>For her part, Orme-Zavaleta said the PFBS assessment published under Biden "could have been a good news story" if released under Trump, offering the administration a significant action at a time of mounting focus on PFAS. Instead, the release of the compromised assessment eroded faith in an agency that prides itself on science-based decisions.</b></div><div>
</div><div>"Scientific integrity, coupled with sound external peer review and quality assurance procedures are critical for ensuring public trust," she said. "When these measures break down or are manipulated, it erodes public trust and jeopardizes our ability to protect public health and the environment, which first and foremost is EPA’s mission."</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">kid killer:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/08/19/formaldehyde-leukemia-epa-trump-suppressed/">https://theintercept.com/2021/08/19/formaldehyde-leukemia-epa-trump-suppressed/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">KOCH</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">intercept 921</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sharon Lerner</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx mANY&nbsp; DOC</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>a 2017 DRAFT assessment of formaldehyde that was suppressed by the Trump administration found that the chemical causes myeloid leukemia,</b>&nbsp;according to several sources familiar with the document.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">The draft assessment concludes that 1 microgram of formaldehyde in a cubic meter of air increases the number of myeloid leukemia cases by roughly 3.5 in 100,000 people, more than three times the cancer risk in the assessment now in use.&nbsp;</span><b>The EPA currently regulates formaldehyde using an outdated set of calculations, finalized in 1991, based on the risk of nasopharyngeal cancer. If the nasopharyngeal cancer and myeloid leukemia risks are combined, the cancer risk could be 4.5 times higher than the current value.</b></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Although the suppressed assessment, produced by a division of the Environmental Protection Agency known as the Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, has grave implications for public health,&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Trump administration officials, including former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, refused to allow the agency to release the assessment, several sources told The Intercept.</span></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>If the Biden EPA permits IRIS to finalize the assessment, which is among the most controversial in the agency’s history, other branches of the EPA will likely set regulatory limits based on the new risk value</b>. IRIS values are used to determine safety thresholds for the amounts of the chemical permitted in air and water, emissions caps from industrial facilities, and guidance for cleanups. Such thresholds also alert exposed people to the dangers they face.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“This is a big, big deal. It could trigger significant interest by the personal injury bar,</b>” said Bob Sussman, who served as the senior policy counsel to the EPA administrator during the Obama administration and deputy EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton. “Even without including the leukemia, the risk is a significant one. With the leukemia, it’s certainly a very significant public health concern.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Even using the much lower, outdated cancer risk number set in 1991,&nbsp;<b>formaldehyde is already the greatest source of nationwide cancer risk from industrial air pollutants,&nbsp;</b>estimated to cause roughly 18 of the 32 cancers in every 1 million people in the U.S. that are caused by toxic pollutants in the air,</span>&nbsp;according to the EPA’s own data. If the risk values are increased by a factor of four or more, the reported cancer risk from formaldehyde will go up accordingly, revealing previously unrecognized cancer hot spots around the country.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Formaldehyde, mainly used to make plywood, particleboard, and glues, is also a hazard for millions of workers who are exposed to the chemical through the production of resins, wood composite and furniture production, plastics manufacturing, paper production, embalming, foundry work, fiberglass production, building construction, agriculture, firefighting, and the teaching of biology, among other occupations. The general public is exposed to formaldehyde through tobacco smoke, cosmetics, food and water, as well as “off-gassing” from consumer goods, construction materials, and furniture. In 2019, 662 facilities reported releasing 47.7 million pounds of formaldehyde.</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition to looking at the chemical’s relationships to nasopharyngeal cancer and leukemia, the draft assessment also factored in evidence that formaldehyde causes decreased lung function, allergic conditions, reproductive and developmental toxicity, and sensory irritation.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In part because formaldehyde is so pervasive, a wide range of business interests have attempted to prevent the EPA from finalizing the assessment and publicly acknowledging the connection to leukemia. Until now, the EPA has kept the contents of its assessment under tight wraps. The leaked information provides a window into how the science and regulation around the chemical will finally be updated</span>.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Just knowing that the IRIS assessment acknowledges that formaldehyde causes myeloid leukemia is huge, regardless of what the value is,” Jennifer McPartland, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, said after being told about the main findings of the draft assessment. “But the numbers tell you even more. They set the tone for how the agency will proceed with risk management.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Assessment Was “Ready to Go”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the EPA has claimed in court that the formaldehyde assessment did not exist in a form that allowed it to be shared — and used that argument to refuse to release it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the environmental whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, o<b>r PEER — former EPA officials told The Intercept that the completed assessment not only existed but that it had also been prepared for release in early 2018.</b></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We had the document ready to go for review within the agency, but we were not allowed to proceed,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, former director of the EPA Office of Research and Development, who retired from the agency in July.<b>&nbsp;“Political leadership did not want me to move it forward.”</b></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Wheeler, the former EPA administrator, was among the Trump appointees who were involved in suppressing the calculation of the myeloid leukemia risk, according to one former agency official who worked on the assessment.</span>&nbsp;“The administrator would not allow us to put out that number,” the former official said, going on to explain how members of the administrator’s office, particularly his chief of staff Ryan Jackson, kept an unusually close eye on the formaldehyde assessment.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Normally when we’re doing an assessment, they [the staff of the administrator’s office] don’t have access to the guts of it, because it’s deliberative. But they would demand that we give them pieces of the assessment, including what literature we were looking at for dose responses,” the former official said, referring to the precise relationship between exposure and cancer risk.&nbsp;<b>“Then they would share it with ACC,” an acronym for the American Chemistry Counci</b>l. Although the former official provided no direct evidence of the administrator’s office sending out the segments of the assessment,&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">they said the actions of the trade group made it clear that it had reviewed the unpublished material.</span></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“All of a sudden, after we gave the information to Ryan Jackson, there would be all this targeted activity by ACC that would basically dismiss or disprove whatever mathematical methodology that we were going to be using even though it hadn’t been published yet,” said the former official. If the EPA did share the information with the trade group, the report would be subject to release under FOIA and would not be exempt under the “deliberative process privilege,” contrary to the agency’s claim in the PEER lawsuit.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WASHINGTON, DC - A<b>PRIL 26:&nbsp; Environmental Protection Agency Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson (R) listens to Administrator Scott Pruitt</b>&nbsp;testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Environment Subcommittee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 26, 2018 in Washington, DC. The focus of nearly a dozen federal inquiries into his travel expenses, security practices and other issues, Pruitt testified about his agency's FY2019 budget proposal.&nbsp; (]</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Orme-Zavaleta confirmed that Jackson, who now works for the National Mining Association, played a key role in preventing the assessment from moving forward. “The ACC was in contact with Ryan a lot,” she said.</font></b></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Asked about his role in the formaldehyde assessment, Jackson stated, “Following enactment of the Lautenberg Act, EPA placed formaldehyde though the risk evaluation required in that new law so formaldehyde could be directly regulated by EPA</b>,” referring to the Trump administration’s decision to add formaldehyde to the list of chemicals to be evaluated under the Toxic Substances Control Act. That assessment has also yet to be completed or released.&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Jackson also stated that “I’m not contributing to anonymous rumors.”</span></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Wheeler declined to comment. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the ACC wrote that the group “has never had access in any manner to unpublished findings from the formaldehyde draft IRIS assessment.”</font></b></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Orme-Zavaleta also pointed to other Trump appointees who she said were apparently involved in suppression of the document. Among them was the<b>&nbsp;director of the Office of Air and Radiation, Bill Wehrum</b>, whose input Orme-Zavaleta needed to move the assessment forward. “<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">A couple times we set up briefings for Bill Wehrum. But they canceled those briefings, and I was not given the OK to further the review within the agency.”</span></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap Koch email to EPA</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 page</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">David Dunlap, who served as deputy assistant administrator in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, also helped suppress the assessment, said Orme-Zavaleta. “When we were in the process of coming up with the priority list for IRIS assessments, a lot of those discussions were held during ‘politicals-only’ meetings, so I wasn’t there. But [Dunlap] was, he was our representative. Formaldehyde was on the list of chemicals being considered. And in November, I got back a short list of the chemicals IRIS would assess, and formaldehyde was not part of it,” she said.&nbsp;</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Dunlap worked for Koch Industries&nbsp;</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">and defended formaldehyde until shortly before he joined the Trump administration in 2018.&nbsp;</span></b><b>Dunlap did eventually recuse himself from work on the assessment, though only after formaldehyde was removed from the list of chemicals IRIS would be allowed to assess</b>, according to Orme-Zavaleta. “I only received a copy of his recusal letter after I got the list of chemicals.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></b></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Dunlap declined to comment on the matter.</font></b></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“EPA lied to us. And they lied to the court.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Presented with information from Orme-Zavaleta and others about the completion of the assessment in 2017,<b>&nbsp;PEER attorney Kevin Bell</b>&nbsp;expressed anger and frustration. Bell oversees 3-year-old litigation against the EPA over the group’s Freedom of Information Act request for the assessment. In that case, the agency has insisted that it didn’t have a completed version of the document that it could publicly release.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“EPA lied to us. And they lied to the court,” said Bell. “They said, ‘We just can’t give you anything like this, because it would be totally full of all sorts of irrelevant things, so that it would totally undermine the deliberative process,’ whereas in reality they had a fully drafted document that was all set to go.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA declined to comment on Bell’s statement but did provide a broader response, saying that “EPA is committed to ensuring that science is at the backbone of everything the Agency does to deliver on our public health and environmental protection mission, and that we operate in a transparent manner to ensure public trust.” Bill Wehrum did not respond to requests for comment.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Decades of Industry Influence</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The suppression of the most recent draft assessment follows many years of interference with government science on formaldehyde. IRIS began updating its original assessment of the chemical in 1997 but almost immediately ran into resistance from industry, particularly&nbsp;<b>around the link to leukemia. A group called the Formaldehyde Council,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">&nbsp;Inc.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 51);">,</span>&nbsp;which represented companies that used the chemical, began challenging the numbers in the assessment and came up with a cancer risk that was thousands of times lower than the EPA’s.&nbsp;<b>Political appointees in the George W. Bush administration also helped industry postpone the release of the updated document.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;A 2008 Government Accountability Office report documented those delays and lamented the public health implications of having to rely on an IRIS assessment that was then 18 years old.</span></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yet that first assessment, completed three decades ago, is still guiding regulation.</span>&nbsp;I<b>n the intervening years, both the International Agency on Cancer Research, or IARC, and National Toxicology Program, whose chemical reviews don’t have the regulatory weight of IRIS assessments, classified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen and recognized it as a cause of leukemia.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">&nbsp;In 2010, the EPA released a draft of the updated assessment, which also found that formaldehyde caused leukemia, but did not finalize it.&nbsp;</span>The&nbsp;<b>ACC was harshly critical of that draft,</b>&nbsp;<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">and the agency sent the report to the National Academy of Sciences for peer review. The external agency confirmed its finding that formaldehyde causes cancer and encouraged the agency to quickly rewrite and reissue its report. But the EPA didn’t complete that work until 2016.</span></font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vincent Cogliano, who directed the IRIS program from 2010 to 2017, said the delays during those years weren’t due to political or industry pressure. “We were really trying to get a very objective assessment released,” said Cogliano, who attributed the slow progress on the assessment in that period to the heavy workload of the small program. While Cogliano characterized some of the science around formaldehyde as complex, he said that no one on the IRIS staff disagreed about the relationship between myeloid leukemia and formaldehyde. “When I left the IRIS program in January 2017, I thought that it was ready to be released,” he said.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And yet more than four years later, the EPA has yet to release the updated IRIS assessment.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s very frustrating,” said Linda Birnbaum, who directed the National Toxicology Program from 2009 to 2019. “Here there is evidence that IARC said that formaldehyde was a known human carcinogen. And we said it was a known human carcinogen and that the data was clear. And more data has come out since then, especially from the National Cancer Institute, yet no word from EPA.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Formaldehyde was added back on to the list of chemicals being assessed on the IRIS public calendar in March. According to an EPA spokesperson, the IRIS Program anticipates releasing the draft assessment of formaldehyde for public comment and external peer review by September 30, 2022. The agency is widely expected to ask the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in on how and whether the agency should combine the cancer risk estimates for myeloid leukemia and nasopharyngeal cancer.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Orme-Zavaleta said that no one in the Biden EPA expressed hesitation about resuming work on it when she raised the issue in the first weeks of President Joe Biden’s tenure. “I asked them several times. I said, ‘I’m going to unsuspend formaldehyde, are you good with that?’ And every time, everybody said, ‘Fine, do it,’” she said. “It is moving!”</font></span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the assurances, those intimately familiar with the history of formaldehyde remain guarded in their optimism that the EPA is finally about to update the assessment of one of the most significant and widespread carcinogens in the U.S.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“For decades, up to now, the industry has pretty much managed to put out all the fires,” said Sussman. “But perhaps something really significant might be about to happen.”</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Update: August 19, 2021</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article has been updated with a comment from the American Chemistry Council.</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">former Koch Industries official is overseeing research at the Environmental Protection Agency that will inform the regulation of certain toxic chemicals found in drinking water, causing some to raise concerns over a possible conflict of interest. David Dunlap was hired to the EPA in October and did not require Senate confirmation for his position. Regulations on the toxic chemicals will determine whether companies that produce them—such as Koch Industries—can be held liable for cleanup costs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see swamp thing</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/04/former-koch-official-runs-epa-chemical-research-1136230</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Former Koch official runs EPA chemical research</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Previously undisclosed documents obtained by POLITICO show David Dunlap began working on the issue almost immediately upon arriving at EPA in October.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By ANNIE SNIDER 02/04/2019&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Trump administration has placed a former Koch Industries official in charge of research that will shape how the government regulates a class of toxic chemicals contaminating millions of Americans’ drinking water — an issue that could have major financial repercussions for his former employer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Dunlap, a deputy in EPA’s Office of Research and Development, is playing a key role as the agency decides how to protect people from the pollution left behind at hundreds of military bases and factories across the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Former Koch official runs EPA chemical research</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Previously undisclosed documents obtained by POLITICO show David Dunlap began working on the issue almost immediately upon arriving at EPA in October.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By ANNIE SNIDER 02/04/2019 06:11 PM EST</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Share on Facebook Share on Twitter</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump administration has placed a former Koch Industries official in charge of research that will shape how the government regulates a class of toxic chemicals contaminating millions of Americans’ drinking water — an issue that could have major financial repercussions for his former employer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Dunlap, a deputy in EPA’s Office of Research and Development, is playing a key role as the agency decides how to protect people from the pollution left behind at hundreds of military bases and factories across the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Donald Trump has not nominated anyone to run the office. That effectively allows Dunlap to avoid the Senate confirmation process while overseeing a central part of EPA's work that could impose cleanup costs on companies that have used the chemicals, including major Koch subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. The paper and pulp conglomerate is already facing at least one class-action lawsuit related to the chemicals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Previously undisclosed documents obtained by POLITICO show Dunlap began working on the issue almost immediately upon arriving at EPA in October. He had spent the previous eight years as Koch Industries' lead expert on water and chemical regulations, a position that typically includes helping companies to limit regulatory restrictions and liability for cleanups.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democratic lawmakers and environmentalist say the prevalence of administration officials who came from the chemicals industry contributes to its hands-off approach to the chemicals, which are appearing in drinking water supplies across the country to rising public alarm. Known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, the chemicals have been linked with kidney and testicular cancer, as well as other ailments.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Both Republicans and Democrats have urged a stronger approach from acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler — who faces a confirmation vote in the Senate Environment Committee Tuesday — but he has stopped short of using all the tools in the agency's arsenal.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Just last week, POLITICO reported the agency has decided against setting drinking water limits for the two most well-understood chemicals in the class in a forthcoming plan for the chemicals, and the new documents show Dunlap was involved in high-level meetings preceding that decision.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said Dunlap’s hiring adds to his concerns about the Trump administration's handling of the issue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Coming on the heels of Mr. Wheeler’s failure to commit to setting a drinking water standard for PFAS, this potential conflict of interest within the agency paints a bleak picture about EPA’s priorities on chemical safety with respect to these particular substances. I look forward to learning more about Mr. Dunlap’s role in the development of EPA’s PFAS management plan,” Carper said in a statement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap’s ethics agreement bars him from “participating in any particular matter involving specific parties” related to Koch Industries, but the agency’s ethics officials have typically taken a narrow interpretation of such prohibitions. And while Dunlap voluntarily recused himself from work on formaldehyde, which Georgia-Pacific produces, the agreement includes no mention of PFAS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Koch Industries spokesperson David Dziok said that Dunlap worked on a broad set of issues related to water and chemicals during his time with the company, but that "PFAs were not part of the portfolio he managed."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap did not respond to a request for comment. EPA did not answer specific questions about Dunlap’s involvement in the agency’s work and his potential conflict of interest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap's calendars, obtained by POLITICO under the Freedom of Information Act, show he participated in at least nine PFAS meetings in his first six weeks on the job, including an Oct. 22 briefing with Wheeler, chief of staff Ryan Jackson and other top political officials. At the time, agency leaders were writing a wide-ranging chemical management plan in which they decided not to set a drinking water standard for the two specific chemicals — PFOA and PFOS. That plan has been under review at the White House since December.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Wheeler</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Both Republicans and Democrats have urged a stronger approach from acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler but he has stopped short of using all the tools in the agency's arsenal. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While those two older chemicals are no longer used in the U.S., EPA estimates that there are between 5,000 and 10,000 similar chemical compounds, used in everything from nonstick cookware to water resistant jackets to microwave popcorn bags. Industry has argued that the newer compounds are less dangerous to human health, but scientists say there is reason to worry that the entire class of PFAS compounds poses a risk. Public health advocates are pushing EPA to regulate the chemicals as a class, arguing that evaluating each one individually will take decades, if it happens at all.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The calendars also show Dunlap helping to shape EPA's approach to these newer compounds that are still in use. He participated in an Oct. 31 call with career staff in his division on two chemicals, GenX and PFBS, for which they were preparing health assessments. Research has shown those new chemicals can also be dangerous, and that those dangers may be greater when people are exposed to them in combination with other chemicals, as they often occur in drinking water. Environmental groups have said the chemicals should be evaluated together to account for those risks, but EPA took the opposite approach when it released the GenX and PFBS health assessments two weeks later.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then on Nov. 5, Dunlap was scheduled to join a call with staff scientific leads to discuss the next slate of chemicals for which they would prepare health assessments. Dunlap's former employer has a stake in which chemicals EPA focuses on: A company spokesperson said Georgia-Pacific may still be using PFAS in its products, as it has in the past, but she would not say which specific chemicals it uses. There are very few legal requirements for companies to tell the public or regulators which chemicals they use in their processes and at which factories.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In response to questions about Dunlap's role, an EPA spokesperson said, "Addressing PFAS is an Agency-wide effort with David Ross, the EPA’s Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water, serving as the EPA staff lead on addressing PFAS."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, the research overseen by Dunlap lays the groundwork for any regulatory decisions Ross is coordinating. EPA officials have underscored the importance of research to their PFAS work in a number of public presentations, including briefings to the agency's Science Advisory Board and at meetings in affected communities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA building&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Exclusive: Trump EPA won't limit 2 toxic chemicals in drinking water</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By ANNIE SNIDER</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Georgia-Pacific, which manufactures products like Brawny paper towels and Dixie cups, has not only used PFAS in some of its food packaging products, but has also owned facilities where the chemicals were disposed, creating a cleanup liability that could prove costly.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The company is already facing a class-action lawsuit from citizens in the town of Parchment, Mich., where last summer state officials discovered the chemicals in drinking water at concentrations as much as 26 times higher than EPA’s recommended limit. That contamination was traced to a paper mill that Georgia-Pacific previously had a stake in.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Georgia-Pacific spokesperson Karen Cole said the company believes that “only a very small percentage of our food wrap and related products — if any” contain the chemicals today, and noted that PFOA and PFOS were phased out of use in food wrappers "several years ago." She said Georgia-Pacific does not apply the PFAS itself, but gets paper from a supplier that in some cases has previously treated it with PFAS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We are currently evaluating past manufacturing practices to better understand any potential previous use of these materials,” she said by email.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his LinkedIn profile, Dunlap describes himself as the “lead and subject matter expert” on water and chemicals issues for Koch’s entire suite of companies during his eight years there. Even if he did not directly manage the company's work on PFAS, it would be “hard to believe that he had not touched any decisions on PFAS with that broad of a scope of responsibilities," said Erik Olson, who leads the Natural Resources Defense Council’s public health work.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Olson said Dunlap’s oversight of EPA’s research on the chemicals raises red flags. “You want an independent, hardheaded scientific review of these issues; you don’t want somebody who is already taking the industry party line,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to federal disclosures, Koch Industries spent at least $90,000 in 2018 lobbying on issues related to chemicals. The American Chemistry Council, the chemicals industry’s largest lobbying group, which Georgia-Pacific has worked through in the past to influence policy on toxic chemicals, spent $9 million last year lobbying lawmakers, EPA and other agencies, including on PFAS issues.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Food and Drug Administration governs the use of chemicals in food wrappers, and has approved 21 PFAS blends for such use, according to Tom Neltner, the chemicals policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund who has conducted research on paper mills’ use of the compounds. But he said the greater liability that paper companies like Georgia-Pacific may face comes from manufacturing waste that contains the chemicals, such as leftover paper trimmings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That waste can end up in landfills or compost that is used to grow fruits and vegetables, Neltner said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"There's a legitimate threat there and, from my perspective, the conflicts of interest that [Dunlap] has having worked as a regulatory compliance director at Georgia-Pacific raises questions about whether he can make those objective decisions or should be recused," he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moreover, Georgia-Pacific may well have cleanup responsibility for other sites like the one in Michigan. During the time it operated the manufacturing plant, from 2000 to 2015, Georgia-Pacific closed a landfill that had also been used by other companies, including at least one that the company says it believes used a 3M-patented PFAS. The class-action lawsuit filed by citizens alleges that Georgia-Pacific did not properly close the landfill to prevent the chemicals from leaching into nearby water. Georgia-Pacific is currently working with the state of Michigan to trace the chemicals' movement through groundwater.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the Superfund law, a company can be held liable for cleanup even if it wasn’t primarily responsible for the contamination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ewg</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">– A former chemical and fossil fuel industry executive who recently oversaw the anti-environmental agenda of the Koch brothers is playing a lead role crafting the Trump administration’s plan to address the crisis of PFAS contamination in the nation’s drinking water supply, according to a report today by Politico.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Dunlap, a top political appointee in the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency, has played a significant role in shaping the agency’s plan for addressing PFAS contamination in the tap water supplies of more than 100 million Americans. According to documents obtained by Politico through a public records request, Dunlap began working on the issue almost immediately after coming to EPA, in October, and has participated in at least nine meetings on PFAS, including one briefing with Andrew Wheeler, the agency’s acting administrator.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap, a chemical engineer, had been the director of environmental affairs at Koch Industries since 2010, before coming into the Trump administration. On his LinkedIn profile, Dunlap described his position at Koch Industries as a “subject matter expert” on water, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, chemical management and the Toxic Substances Control Act. Before working for Koch, Dunlap worked at the Chlorine Institute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last week, Politico Pro’s Annie Snider reported that, according to her sources, Wheeler will not move to regulate any of the PFAS family of fluorinated chemicals by setting a legal limit, known as a maximum contaminant level, under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Studies have linked PFAS chemicals to cancer, kidney disease, weakened childhood immunity and other health problems.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, installs a former Koch executive to clean up toxic chemicals in drinking water, the chances of it happening are about as likely as snowfall in San Diego,” said EWG Senior Vice President of Government Affairs Scott Faber. “We hope both Wheeler and Dunlap will follow EPA’s mission statement instead of the demands of the chemical industry and adopt a health-protective drinking water standard that will reduce PFAS in the drinking water serving millions of people.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EWG and researchers at Northeastern University have tracked 172 PFAS contamination sites in 40 states. Drawing on unreleased data from EPA tests, EWG estimates that water supplies for as many as 110 million Americans may be contaminated.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">TP oct 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Environmental Protection Agency has hired a former Koch Industries staffer who worked on water and chemical policy to fill a key role within the agency, continuing a Trump administration trend of appointing company insiders to oversee the industries they are meant to regulate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Dunlap, a former Koch chemical engineer who has served as director of policy and regulatory affairs with the right-wing corporation since 2010, is joining the EPA as deputy assistant administrator for research and development. Prior to his eight years with Koch, Dunlap worked for the Chlorine Institute overseeing health and environmental safety, in addition to roles with both the Uniform and Textile Service Association and Ogden Environmental.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“As a chemical engineer, Mr. Dunlap has worked on environmental issues for nearly 30 years with a focus on assessing risk,” read a statement from EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson. “His extensive experience on regulatory issues will be pivotal in our mission to protect human health and the environment.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Koch Industries is a massive conglomerate overseen by the Koch brothers, major conservative donors who have spent decades undercutting U.S. climate and environmental policies — the brothers’ fortune was made largely from fossil fuels but has since expanded to chemicals and manufacturing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In April, Senate Democrats indicated that they would probe the influence of the brothers on Trump administration policies, specifically with reference to the EPA and the Department of the Interior. The Kochs have appeared to take credit for the rollback of the Clean Power Plan, among other Obama-era initiatives targeted by the Trump administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scope of Koch influence on Trump climate policy under scrutiny</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A spokesperson for Koch Industries told Courthouse News on Monday that Dunlap is “not working for Koch Industries in any capacity” at this time, indicating that he has officially left his prior position with the company.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap’s predecessor, Richard Yamada, left the EPA in September after only 15 months in the position. Yamada was largely seen as one of the chief drivers behind a deeply controversial “secret science” policy proposal attempting to limit the use of private data in scientific studies. Such efforts have been a pet cause of retiring Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX); Yamada previously had a role working with Smith to draft similar legislation prior to interest from the Trump administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And during former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s tenure, the Heritage Foundation — which has received numerous donations from the Koch brothers over the years — hosted a closed-door meeting with Pruitt and others to discuss the policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his new role, Dunlap will help to oversee a number of crucial programs. The risk assessment program that produced a health study linking formaldehyde to cancer, for instance, falls under the EPA’s research and development arm. Trump administration officials have blocked that report, seemingly due to pressure from the chemical industry. Formaldehyde is a prevalent chemical throughout the United States and is often found in items like particle boards and crease-resistant fabrics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Georgia-Pacific Chemicals LLC, a Koch Industries subsidiary, is one of the largest formaldehyde producers in the country, and has lobbied against the study’s release according to Politico. As a former Koch employee, Dunlap will now be in a position to direct the study’s future, amid a heavy industry lobbying effort.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA is in the midst of a controversial streamlining effort; last week, the agency announced that the Office of the Science Advisor will be closing. Meanwhile, Dunlap’s appointment will provide a measure of political leadership within the EPA while allowing the Trump administration to avoid a Senate confirmation hearing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Politics-driven ‘secret science’ initiative isn’t going over well with EPA staff</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recent battles over agency nominees with industry backgrounds have proven bruising for the White House, although the administration has largely succeeded in its efforts to appoint officials with strong ties to the companies and sectors they now oversee. That includes acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, who previously served as a coal lobbyist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Green groups and advocates argue that revolving door between industry and the federal government has taken a toll on environmental regulations. The Trump administration has overseen an onslaught of environmental regulation rollbacks, many directly benefiting fossil fuel industries, chemical companies, and corporate interests more broadly. Most recently, the EPA has indicated that it will propose easing limitations on the toxic chemical mercury, in a victory for the coal industry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Drinking Water PFAS Contamination Crisis: Ex-Koch Chemicals ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.ecowatch.com/david-dunlap-koch-brothers-epa-2628051010.html</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 day ago - David Dunlap, a former chemical and fossil fuel industry executive who ... agenda of theKoch brothers, is playing a lead role crafting the Trump ... as a "subject matter expert" on water, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, ... will not move to regulate any of the PFAS family of fluorinated chemicals by setting ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Former Koch official runs EPA chemical research - POLITICO</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.politico.com/.../former-koch-official-runs-epa-chemical-research-113623...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 days ago - The Trump administration has placed a former Koch Industries official in ... David Dunlap, a deputy in EPA's Office of Research and ... He had spent the previous eight years as Koch Industries' lead expert on water and chemical regulations, ... on chemical safety with respect to these particular substances.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Official Helping Craft EPA Response On Toxic Chemicals Once ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../david-dunlap-epa-pfas-chemicals_us_5c591ba3e4...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1 day ago - David Dunlap, a deputy in the EPA's Office of Research and ... for more than eight years as a lead expert on water and chemical regulations. ... Koch told Politico that the chemicals were not part of his work during his time at the corporation. ... Goes After Trump Administration For Chemical Deregulation Plan ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Missing: safety ?| ?Must include: ?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">safety</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Former Koch staffer appointed to key EPA position – ThinkProgress</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://thinkprogress.org/koch-epa-industry-david-dunlap-chemical-water-1f08cfa2fb...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Oct 2, 2018 - David Dunlap, a former Koch chemical engineer who has served as director of policy andregulatory affairs with the right-wing corporation since ... for the Chlorine Institute overseeing health and environmental safety, in addition to roles with ... Scope of Koch influence on Trump climate policy under scrutiny.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Report: Ex-Koch Executive Put in Charge of EPA's PFAS Plan | EWG</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.ewg.org/release/report-ex-koch-executive-put-charge-epa-s-pfas-plan</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2 days ago - David Dunlap, a top political appointee in the Office of Research and ... affairs at KochIndustries since 2010, before coming into the Trump administration. ... as a “subject matter expert” onwater, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, ... according to her sources, Wheeler will not move toregulate any of the ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump Admin Has Put A Koch Official In Charge Of America's ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://mavenroundtable.io/.../the-trump-admin-has-put-a-koch-official-in-charge-of-a...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">19 hours ago - David Dunlap was a top expert on water and chemical regulations for Koch Industries before joining the EPA.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Missing: safety ?| ?Must include: ?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">safety</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EPA: Ex-Koch official steps away from formaldehyde study -- Thursday ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060110585</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dec 27, 2018 - David Dunlap, a political deputy in EPA's research office and a former Koch ... As director of policy and regulatory affairs, he was the lead expert on water and ... clearly demonstrates there aresafe thresholds for formaldehyde exposure ... employer Koch to stay in line with President Trump'sethics pledge.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.linkedin.com/in/dunlap-david-78981834/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">cf 019 sotu child cancer BS!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trump-accused-of-waging-a-war-on-children-through-epa-regulatory-rollbacks-293fe0edc2e9/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Child Health Day, celebrated on Monday, was meant to highlight efforts taken by the nation to protect children’s health. As it turned out, Child Health Day, which kicked off Children’s Health Month, served as a moment for the nation to come to terms with how the Trump administration has prioritized the removal of industry regulations over health protections for children.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has taken numerous actions that do not bode well for the future health of American children.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And in the past week alone, the administration has introduce plans to rollback back key pollution rules, removed the head of the EPA’s children’s health office, and was shown to have scrubbed any mention of the impact of climate change on children from a draft document.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Monday it was revealed that the Trump administration is moving forward with a proposal to rollback limits on lead, mercury, and other dangerous air pollution from the nation’s coal-fired power plants, putting children at risk from known brain poisons and toxic pollutants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, finalized in 2011, were projected to preventup to 11,000 premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks yearly, while delivering annual health benefits totaling up to $90 billion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“What the Trump EPA is pursuing — the fraudulent denial of real-world benefits from clean air and climate safeguards — is the unholy grail of the polluting industry and its lobbyists,” John Walke, clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Monday in a statement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then on Tuesday, E&E News reported that the Trump administration removed language about how climate change affects children’s health from a draft EPA proposal on heat-trapping chemicals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An earlier draft of an EPA proposal on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) contained language about how children are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. That language was removed during a review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), according to E&E News.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s EPA makes ‘sneaky’ move to hamstring its children’s health office</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Every day we see more evidence that this administration is actively working against the health and safety of the most vulnerable Americans — our children,” Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, said Wednesday in a statement. “Tragically, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the Trump administration is waging a war on children.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">HFCs are used in refrigeration and air-conditioning appliances and are a significant contributor to the depletion of the ozone layer. Their atmospheric concentrations and contribution to greenhouse gas emissions are known to be rapidly increasing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scientists are concerned about the rise in HFC use because they are thousands of times more potent on a pound-per-pound basis than carbon dioxide. The Obama administration, as part of its climate action plan, issued a rule aimed at reducing the amount of HFCs released from appliances that use them as coolants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The news of the administration deleting language from the chemical rule came just days after the head of EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection was placed on administrative leave with no explanation, fueling speculation that the office itself may be eliminated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a letter written by Ruth Etzel, the head of the office, she said: “I appear to be the ‘fall guy’ for their plan to ‘disappear’ the office of children’s health.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile, the EPA is also fighting a federal court ruling ordering the agency to ban of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which can cause brain damage and development disabilities in children at even low doses. In 2017, former EPA chief Scott Pruitt reversed an earlier decision to ban of the pesticide only weeks after meeting with the head of Dow Chemical, which manufactures the chemical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s EPA to close research center that protects public health</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered the EPA in early August to bar the widely used chlorpyrifos within 60 days. The court decided the EPA had been ignoring its own science that allegedly showed chlorpyrifos is a danger to children.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA, however, filed a petition with the court last month asking for a hearing on the decision before all the judges on the Ninth Circuit. If the court order stands, chlorpyrifos would be officially banned as of next Tuesday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House’s OIRA has removed references to climate change from other EPA proposals, including its proposed Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, E&E News reported. The ACE rule would replace the Clean Power Plan, the Obama administration’s signature climate rule that would cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The new plan could result in up to 1,400 more premature deaths and up to 120,000 more asthma attacks every year, according to the EPA’s own analysis.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But, in celebration of Children’s Health Day on Monday, acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler held an event at the EPA courtyard. He did not address any of the changes at the agency that could harm the health of children.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Instead, Wheeler touted the EPA’s efforts on behalf on children, despite the long list of clean air and clean water rules the Trump administration has sought to undo. “Children’s health is a top priority at EPA, and we have made tremendous progress improving air and water quality and helping kids and families lead healthier lives,” he said at the event. "</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The fact that Wheeler reportedly finalized a plan to repeal protections against mercury pollution just one day before he stood in front of a school bus celebrating Children’s Health Day is an insult to American families,” Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign Director Mary Anne Hitt said in a statement on Monday. “While Wheeler’s former employers reap the profits from rollback after rollback, our kids will be paying with their health.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prior to joining the Trump EPA, Wheeler served as a top lobbyist for Murray Energy, a major U.S. coal company.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In other attacks on children’s health, the Trump EPA announced to staff last week that it will move forward with plans to reorganize multiple offices housed under its Office of Research and Development (ORD). The National Center for Environmental Research, an EPA office that works to test the effects of chemical exposure on adults and children, will be shuttered as part of the reorganization.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the reorganization, David Dunlap, a former Koch Industries chemical engineer, will head the ORD as a deputy chief, a role that will not need Senate confirmation. Prior to his eight years with Koch, Dunlap worked for the Chlorine Institute overseeing health and environmental safety.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://thinkprogress.org/koch-epa-industry-david-dunlap-chemical-water-1f08cfa2fb01/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Environmental Protection Agency has hired a former Koch Industries staffer who worked on water and chemical policy to fill a key role within the agency, continuing a Trump administration trend of appointing company insiders to oversee the industries they are meant to regulate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Dunlap, a former Koch chemical engineer who has served as director of policy and regulatory affairs with the right-wing corporation since 2010, is joining the EPA as deputy assistant administrator for research and development. Prior to his eight years with Koch, Dunlap worked for the Chlorine Institute overseeing health and environmental safety, in addition to roles with both the Uniform and Textile Service Association and Ogden Environmental.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“As a chemical engineer, Mr. Dunlap has worked on environmental issues for nearly 30 years with a focus on assessing risk,” read a statement from EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson. “His extensive experience on regulatory issues will be pivotal in our mission to protect human health and the environment.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Koch Industries is a massive conglomerate overseen by the Koch brothers, major conservative donors who have spent decades undercutting U.S. climate and environmental policies — the brothers’ fortune was made largely from fossil fuels but has since expanded to chemicals and manufacturing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In April, Senate Democrats indicated that they would probe the influence of the brothers on Trump administration policies, specifically with reference to the EPA and the Department of the Interior. The Kochs have appeared to take credit for the rollback of the Clean Power Plan, among other Obama-era initiatives targeted by the Trump administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Scope of Koch influence on Trump climate policy under scrutiny]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A spokesperson for Koch Industries told Courthouse News on Monday that Dunlap is “not working for Koch Industries in any capacity” at this time, indicating that he has officially left his prior position with the company.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dunlap’s predecessor, Richard Yamada, left the EPA in September after only 15 months in the position. Yamada was largely seen as one of the chief drivers behind a deeply controversial “secret science” policy proposal attempting to limit the use of private data in scientific studies. Such efforts have been a pet cause of retiring Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX); Yamada previously had a role working with Smith to draft similar legislation prior to interest from the Trump administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And during former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s tenure, the Heritage Foundation — which has received numerous donations from the Koch brothers over the years — hosted a closed-door meeting with Pruitt and others to discuss the policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his new role, Dunlap will help to oversee a number of crucial programs. The risk assessment program that produced a health study linking formaldehyde to cancer, for instance, falls under the EPA’s research and development arm. Trump administration officials have blocked that report, seemingly due to pressure from the chemical industry. Formaldehyde is a prevalent chemical throughout the United States and is often found in items like particle boards and crease-resistant fabrics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Georgia-Pacific Chemicals LLC, a Koch Industries subsidiary, is one of the largest formaldehyde producers in the country, and has lobbied against the study’s release according to Politico. As a former Koch employee, Dunlap will now be in a position to direct the study’s future, amid a heavy industry lobbying effort.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA is in the midst of a controversial streamlining effort; last week, the agency announced that the Office of the Science Advisor will be closing. Meanwhile, Dunlap’s appointment will provide a measure of political leadership within the EPA while allowing the Trump administration to avoid a Senate confirmation hearing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Politics-driven ‘secret science’ initiative isn’t going over well with EPA staff]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recent battles over agency nominees with industry backgrounds have proven bruising for the White House, although the administration has largely succeeded in its efforts to appoint officials with strong ties to the companies and sectors they now oversee. That includes acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, who previously served as a coal lobbyist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Green groups and advocates argue that revolving door between industry and the federal government has taken a toll on environmental regulations. The Trump administration has overseen an onslaught of environmental regulation rollbacks, many directly benefiting fossil fuel industries, chemical companies, and corporate interests more broadly. Most recently, the EPA has indicated that it will propose easing limitations on the toxic chemical mercury, in a victory for the coal industry.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></div></div>