The Point
Jan. 26, 2026
Highlights:
With the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s authority to collect fees from chemical manufacturers to fund the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) set to expire in June of this year, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment recently held a hearing to look at ways to “modernize America’s chemical safety law, strengthen critical supply chains, and grow domestic manufacturing.”
In his opening remarks, Subcommittee Chairman Gary Palmer (R-AL) said that while TSCA was amended by Congress back in 2016 with the passage of the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, “it has become clear that this important law is still not working as Congress intended, and that further changes are needed to ensure chemicals are reviewed in a predictable and efficient process without undermining safety.”
Prior to this hearing, the Subcommittee released a discussion draft to modernize TSCA. Chairman Palmer stressed that the “draft would not scrap the safety protections enacted in the 2016 amendments and is not reopening up TSCA as a whole,” but that among other things, it would make “targeted changes to modernize Section 5 and Section 6 concerning the review and regulations of new and existing chemicals, including requiring increased coordination between the EPA and other agencies and prioritizing chemicals that are essential to critical manufacturing supply chains.”
Much of the hearing focused on EPA’s misguided interpretation of TSCA over the last few years, which has inhibited the chemical review process, stifled innovation, and allowed our international rivals to capture an even larger share of the global chemical manufacturing market.
Rather than being grounded in sound science, witness Dr. Kimberly Wise White from the American Chemistry Council categorized TSCA as a “speculative, opaque system” that has resulted in “every evaluated chemical being labeled an unreasonable risk.” Another witness, John Carey, Esq., of the chemical company dsm-firmenich, questioned why the EPA is “deviating from measured data and instead using assumptions” when it comes to chemical risk assessments, pointing to a 2023 EPA inspector general’s report which found that the “EPA did not have standard operating procedures for exposure assessment or hazard assessment.”
Attorney Dimitrios Karakitsos of Holland & Knight, who was the principle drafter and negotiator in the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW) when TSCA was amended 10 years ago, said that the EPA has not implemented the TSCA reforms as Congress intended, but rather has relied on “cherry picked studies” to achieve a favorable “political outcome” instead of basing decisions on the best available scientific data.
“What we’ve seen in many instances is EPA rely on, I would say, cherry picked studies or IRIS assessments that have been badly criticized by National Academy of Science and others, which makes it looks like sometimes it’s more about a political outcome than it is about using the best science in the process.” – Dimitrios Karakitsos
Congress has an opportunity this year to modernize TSCA to ensure chemical risk assessments are grounded in sound science while also considering real world scenarios for how a chemical might be used, striking the appropriate balance between public health and scientific innovation in order to strengthen our national security and boost our international competitiveness.