EPA watchdog knocks Trump officials over weakened assessment for toxic chemical

The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog on Tuesday knocked a Trump-era move in which political officials weakened an assessment on the dangers of a toxic chemical. 

The Office of the EPA’s Inspector General issued a new report that stated political appointees used a last-minute disagreement to take the “unprecedented” step of listing a range of values for the toxicity of a chemical known as PFBS instead of a definitive toxicity level.

It also said that anyone in charge of cleaning up PFBS contamination could have used a lower estimation of the chemical’s toxicity level as a result. It said that this could have caused the use of “less costly, but possibly insufficient” actions to mitigate a contamination problem.

However, the report notes that the assessment in question was only in effect for a few weeks, as it was later revoked by the Biden administration. 

Overall, the watchdog states that the move by political officials delayed the release of a toxicity assessment for PFBS and weakened the agency’s “commitments to scientific integrity and information quality.”

PFBS belongs to a class of toxic chemicals that have been linked to cancers and other illnesses. These chemicals are known collectively as PFAS and nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they linger in nature and the human body instead of breaking down. 

They have been used to make products including firefighting foam and Teflon pans as well as  other non-stick or waterproof products including clothing and cosmetics. They have been found to have contaminated nearly 60,000 sites across the country, and according to one federal study, they have been found in the blood of 97 percent of Americans. 

Exposure to PFBS specifically causes negative impacts on the thyroid, reproductive organs, tissues, liver, and kidneys, the watchdog said. 

The new watchdog report describes an incident in which, four days before a report on PFBS’s toxicity was expected to be published, a political appointee “intervened” and directed scientists to conduct an additional review. This additional review focused on uncertainty factors used in calculating the chemical’s toxicity. 

The report says that the political appointee was the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention’s deputy assistant administrator; it does not name the person, but David Fischer, who previously worked for a chemical trade group called the American Chemistry Council, was serving in the role at that time. 

After the review, the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics issued a memo saying there was a scientific disagreement, which ultimately led to the “unprecedented” issuance of a range of toxicity values, the report said. 

The watchdog also said that political appointees ultimately changed portions of the assessment and added that this “was not promptly communicated” to scientists who drafted the original assessment. 

It said that ultimately, the “redline mark-up” changes were accepted by someone in the Office of the Administrator rather than the Office of Research and Development, which was the lead office on the assessment. 

In response to official comments from the EPA, the watchdog described the approval of the changes by the administrator’s office as a “scientific integrity violation.”

Andrew Wheeler, who was serving as the EPA’s administrator at the time that the toxicity assessment was published, said there wasn’t any such violation in an emailed statement to The Hill.

“There was no scientific integrity violation period.  There was a dispute between two EPA offices, all sides were heard, and I made a policy call which is completely within the purview of the Administrator and consistent with the Differing Scientific Opinions guidance as noted by the OIG in their report,” he said. 

In official comments, the Biden EPA knocked a draft report from the watchdog for not going further in its description of the incident, saying that the incident was “political interference.”

The Biden administration has previously described the incident in question as political interference that would have allowed polluters to “cherry pick” the toxicity value that they wanted to use.

At the time, David Dunlap, a Trump administration official who had been serving as deputy assistant administrator in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, pushed back on the Biden administration’s characterization, saying that the use of multiple toxicity values was a “compromise” amid disagreements.

— Updated at 5:03 p.m.