House, Senate leaders ‘finalizing’ chemical bill compromise

Leading lawmakers in the House and Senate said Tuesday evening they are in the final stages of hammering out a compromise bill to reform federal chemical safety standards.

After months of negotiation, representatives of House Republicans, Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats said a final deal is near to reconcile the different measures the chambers passed last year to reform the nearly 40-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act.

{mosads}“House and Senate negotiators are finalizing a TSCA reform bill that represents an improvement over both the House and Senate bills in key respects,” the lawmakers said in a joint statement.

“Current federal law only provides very limited protection. We are hopeful that Congress will be taking action soon on reforming this important environmental law.”

The lawmakers did not set a timeline for the final bill. But earlier Tuesday, many of the leading lawmakers said the deal was days away.

The key constituency missing from the joint statement was House Democrats.

The statement came hours after Reps. Frank Pallone (N.J.) and Paul Tonko (N.Y.), the top Democrats negotiating toward the TSCA compromise, withdrew their support for the talks.

Pallone and Tonko said in a statement of their own that “it would be better for us to not act at all than to pass the deal that Energy and Commerce Republican leaders and Senate negotiators are proposing,” and they charged that the current draft legislation was worse than either the House or Senate bills.

But representatives of the three other constituencies involved disagreed, saying their draft is better than either chamber’s bill.

Since the talks are still talks place behind closed doors, it is unclear what’s in the current deal, or how it compares with each chamber’s legislation.

While both bills are bipartisan, the Senate generally went farther than the House in strengthening the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to order testing on and prohibit sales of new and existing chemicals that are deemed harmful. But lawmakers were generally divided on issues such as funding for chemical studies, the power of states to make their own rules and other issues.