Tracking the activities of President Trump and his people makes me feel like I am standing in the path of a fire hose and I suspect I am not alone. Incessant online visits produce insomnia. Rationing intake is crucial and the best way to do that is to read sources like Confined Space that digest the news–specifically how Republicans are curbing government regulation of workplace hazards at the Department of Labor, in the White House, and on Capitol Hill.
One troubling development—increasing worker exposure to toxic chemicals that cause cancer—has barely risen to prominence online.
Today, somewhere in the range of 40,000-60,000 chemicals circulate in commerce and about 6,000 of these account for more than 99% of total chemical volume. Some are beneficial, but others kill or maim and have not been controlled effectively. OSHA inaction on toxic chemicals is one of its worst failures. The agency is authorized to issue “Permissible Exposure Limits” and has set such standards for about 500 chemicals. But almost all of these standards were issued in the early 1970s and are based on science from the 1950s and 1960s. Five decades later, the American Industrial Hygiene Association and several states have issued far lower numbers for permissible exposure that render OSHA’s contributions a sad relic.
During the Obama administration, OSHA issued two important new limits for silica and beryllium, but it took 20 years from the time they were added to OSHA’s Regulatory Agenda until they were finalized. And, consistent with President Trump’s pledge to revive the coal industry, the administration is in the process of drastically weakening the silica rule’s requirements for the mining industry that were issued during the Biden administration.
TSCA to the Rescue
The only backstop for this state of affairs is EPA’s authority to regulate toxics. EPA is also beleaguered, but accomplished significant progress under the Biden administration. The agency’s strongest legal authority originates in the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA, pronounced like the Puccini opera Tosca) that was signed into law by President Ford in 1976 and amended in 2016. The law authorizes EPA to take action when a chemical that poses an “unreasonable risk to public health or the environment.” Health includes worker health.
The law was precautionary, meaning that the agency need not wait until injury or death is documented to take action. For four decades, the agency struggled with this broad mandate. The requirements of the law were convoluted and burdensome, no deadlines were included, and the agency’s budget for the work never came close to meeting those demands. Chemical companies caught on quickly that to win in Washington demands representational heft.
The chemical industry is the second largest manufacturing enterprise in the world and that trend is moving upward. It spends a great deal of money on lobbying. According to OpenSecrets, the premier site for such of data, in 2024 the American Chemistry Council ranked tenth of 9,200 groups spending money on lobbying, ahead of Amazon but behind the National Association of Realtors and the Chamber of Commerce. A category described as “chemical and related manufacturing” fielded 557 lobbyists that year.
TSCA Modernization
In 2016, after years of partisan struggle, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act. Members and staff were surprised that they achieved this elusive goal.[1] Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) told a reporter that he was a mountain climber and when he was on top of a summit, “it’s pure elation. And that’s how I feel today.” Senator Jim Inhofe (R-IA), his more taciturn Republican colleague, said “This is a big deal, what we’re doing here. Republicans should look at this as fulfilling our constitutional duty.” (Inhofe was the author of the 2012 book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future and once brought a snowball onto the Senate floor as evidence the planet is not warming.) Even the chemical industry’s leading trade association, the American Chemistry Council, ended up signing on to the compromise.
The 2016 amendments retained the mandate of the original law, instructing EPA to develop exposure limits for chemicals that may present an “unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.” It required the agency to develop a priority list of chemicals on the basis of hazard and route of exposure (who it affects and whether it is inhaled, ingested, or handled). When chemicals posing an unreasonable risk are identified, EPA must control them within two years (or four if the need for an extension is demonstrated).
Chemicals that are persistent (last a long time in environment) and bioaccumulative (build up in the body), the deadline is 18 months. The new law allowed manufacturers to request EPA reviews of lower risk chemicals to determine if warnings could be downgraded provided that the manufacturers contribute to the cost of that process. In a win for industry, the law preempted state efforts to control toxic chemicals if EPA was already working on them.
Not all the key players were thrilled with the compromise. Two prominent dissenters were the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a national non-profit with the most expertise on the regulation of toxic chemicals, and Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the ranking member on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee who is generally perceived as an advocate for environmental and public health protections. Once President Obama signed the legislation, the celebrations and misgivings faded into the background and EPA went off to implement the new law.
TSCA on the Rocks
But once again, problems plagued these efforts.
First, the budget for TSCA work did not increase to meet the new demands. Second, the chemical industry continued to harass EPA, making the already difficult work of evaluating the risk of new chemicals much harder. And third, Donald Trump became the president in 2025, promising comprehensive deregulation. And, as it always has been, EPA became the poster child for such efforts.
The first Trump administration decreed that when writing a risk assessment under TSCA, EPA must assume that workers facing chemical exposures always had protective equipment (for example, gloves, masks, respirators, goggles, and hard hats) and used it properly. Because OSHA’s workplace inspection capacity has shrunk so much, we cannot know how many workplaces actually provide such equipment and, as important, insist that workers use it. If the injury and fatality stories addressed frequently in Confined Space is any indication, a safe bet is that many, if not most, employers do neither. The Biden administration ended this misguided policy in June 2021, returning EPA to the policy of assessing the risks of toxic chemical exposures without factoring in protective equipment that might or might not be provided or used.
With the advent of a second Trump administration, Republicans in Congress and their industry supporters decided to grasp the opportunity to undermine the law once and for all. The justification for new legislation is the expiration of the industry fees that support the program. But discussion drafts in the House and Senate go much further than just addressing fees. Republicans and their chemical industry allies became relentless critics of the law, while environmentalists took the position that EPA had made progress in controlling the worst chemicals and should be left alone to finish this work.
The most important change in proposed legislation discards EPA’s authority to address chemicals that “may present an unreasonable risk” and instead would require the agency to show that the chemical is “more likely than not to present” any risk. “More likely than not” is akin to the standard that applies to civil damages cases in court. The plaintiff—the party that wants the relief—must prove by the preponderance of the evidence that (s)he is entitled to relief. Preponderance means at least 51%. Or, in other words, EPA stands in the place of the plaintiff and must accumulate at least half of existing information to control it even though the manufacturer is the entity that has all the information.
Democratic opposition is likely to thwart passage of the legislation, especially in the Senate where the filibuster requires 60 votes to pass a bill. If Democrats regain control of the House, passage becomes even more unlikely. TSCA is the first environmental statute up in Congress for drastic revision.
But bad legislation that is unlikely to pass is a relatively small problem. Much more threatening in the short and mid-term is the destruction of EPA’s workforce and morale that will require a great deal of time and energy to reverse. Gutting the laws that give the agencies their marching orders would make those efforts far more difficult.
Trump Undermines Chemical Regulation
Unfortunately, what cannot be accomplished on Capitol Hill is already percolating at EPA where two top officials who migrated over from the American Chemistry Council have been hard at work. The best known is Nancy Beck who serves as the deputy assistant administrator in charge of implementing TSCA. Her goal is to change an assumption that has always been at the core of controlling cancer-causing chemicals—namely that such substances have no safe level of exposure. If Beck has her way, this approach would be flipped on its head and the chemical industry would achieve what has seemed like an unattainable goal: substituting the opposing assumption that some exposure to carcinogens is safe.
This change is drastic and flies in the face of the scientific consensus. As David Michaels, former OSHA administrator and now a professor in epidemiology at George Washington University, told the New York Times, “Within the scientific community, the idea that there is a safe threshold for carcinogenic exposures is not widely accepted. But the idea of a threshold is a holy grail for industry.”
Beck and her allies have chosen a doozy of a chemical as their first test run: Formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a colorless, flammable gas with a pungent and irritating smell that is used in many industries as a preservative, binder, and anti-microbial agent. It is used in a wide range of industries to make building materials, plastics, pesticides, paints, and adhesives. Long-term exposure contributes to the development of asthma, the decline of pulmonary and respiratory function, a decrease in fertility, and cancers that include leukemia and cancers of the upper respiratory tract. According to the American Chemistry Council, products using formaldehyde support more than 1.5 million jobs.
In 2025, the Biden administration issued a protective risk calculation for formaldehyde exposure based on the assumption that carcinogens do not have a safe dose. The Trump EPA is in the process of replacing that risk calculation with a revised document that would permit exposures at almost twice the level as the Biden version. That the new approach contradicts an earlier finding that formaldehyde is the most toxic air pollutant that it tracks. Nineteen red state attorneys general supported the Trump EPA’s new approach arguing that formaldehyde is an essential chemical that should be manufactured in the United States rather than China.
Lawsuits are likely once the new risk assessment is made final and, depending on where they are filed, the outcome is up for grabs. The chemical industry has expended considerable effort generating studies to support the idea of safe exposure to formaldehyde and the chemical’s ubiquity makes winning this round financially attractive. If the new approach sticks, other toxics will soon join the line.
[1] Arianna Skibell, “Congress feels ‘pure elation’ on TSCA as advocates hunker down,” E&E Daily (June 6, 2016).