After Years of Gains, GOP Pushes to Roll Back Chemical Regulations

For the past four years, Jackie Medcalf has been testing the groundwater in northwest Houston where, decades ago, a dry cleaning facility had, over time, dumped hazardous chemicals used in the dry cleaning process into the stormwater drain, ditches and alleyways. The chemicals eventually seeped into the groundwater and migrated west to the community of Cyprus, where Medcalf and her team at the Texas Health and Environment Alliance are still finding contamination. 

The Environmental Protection Agency placed the area, known as the Jones Road Ground Water Plume, on its Superfund National Priorities List in 2003 for cleanup. 

“These chemicals are undetectable to the resident who lives above it. They’re strongly associated with different diseases, and the contamination can come up through the ground as a vapor,” Medcalf said. “And we’re still finding it in the water.”
 

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This groundwater contamination was top of mind when Medcalf heard about a new draft bill crafted by the House of Representatives in January. The bill would amend large portions of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act — a series of EPA regulations meant to police the manufacturing, processing and use of chemical substances, including such contaminants as those found at Jones Road. 

In 2016, Congress reformed the act, commonly referred to as TSCA, with bipartisan support to give more authority to the EPA to review and regulate chemical substances. 

Now, a decade later, House conservatives are proposing to walk back many of the 2016 reforms, citing issues in efficiency, predictability and competitiviness, while promising that the changes will modernize the Toxic Substances Control Act. Health and environmental experts, advocates and residents like Medcalf have expressed alarm at the proposed changes, pointing to the implications the bill would have for local Texas communities and petrochemical workers due to the weakening of EPA’s authority to regulate existing and new hazardous chemicals. 

The draft bill is just one of the many rollbacks in regulating chemicals since President Donald Trump launched his second term in office last January. Since the 2016 reforms, the EPA has reevaluated and published more stringent rulings on highly hazardous chemicals, but in the past year, the federal agency has changed direction and is reconsidering many of these rulings amid legal pressure from the chemical industry. The chemicals include such substances as perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride — all of which are known health hazards and used in chemical manufacturing at Texas facilities.

For environmental advocates like Medcalf, learning about the proposed EPA changes and reconsiderations came to her like whiplash. She grew up near the petrochemical industry and understands the implications of unregulated chemicals. 

“In 2024, we felt like things were moving in the right direction with respect to some of these chemicals,” Medcalf said. “And you know, now we’re most certainly concerned that things are moving in the direction unfavorable for human exposure.”

Controlling Toxic Substances

When Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, the EPA administrator likened it to “preventive medicine” — meant to give public health far more weight over which chemicals are commercially produced and marketed. At the time it marked a major shift for the country’s chemical industry, which previously had been largely unregulated. 

Despite the change, the EPA still had less control over the regulation of chemicals than originally intended, said Suhani Chitalia, attorney and senior manager of federal affairs for the Environmental Defense Fund. 

“The way the law was written back in the ’70s wasn’t super effective,” Chitalia said. “I think it was good in theory, but the actual practice and authority that the Environmental Protection Agency had to implement the law wasn’t as strong as it should be, and part of that was the EPA couldn’t really look at new chemicals coming into the market before they entered the market.” 

Hazardous chemicals, such as methylene chloride, trichloroethylene, formaldehyde and asbestos, among others, were approved without a full review, said Chitalia. In response, Congress, in a bipartisan vote, passed the Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety amendment in 2016, and the EPA was granted the authority to prioritize and assess certain existing hazardous chemicals on the market. 

A decade later, the chemical industry now argues that that amendment has slowed the process down, citing EPA assessments for a new chemical lasting longer than the allotted 90-day period and impeding innovation in the nation’s market. In response, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by House Republicans, released an altered version of the Toxic Substances Control Act in mid-January. 

The American Chemical Council, a leading proponent in these changes, said in a statement to Capital & Main that the draft discussion legislation focuses on durable, practical fixes, improving timeliness, predictability and scientific rigor.

The council also asserted that, as it stands, the Toxic Substances Control Act is “speculative and opaque” and “over sixty percent of new chemical reviews remain pending for more than a year” — a major concern for chemical companies that say pending reviews can lead to processing delays. 

Katherine Culbert, a senior process safety engineer in Houston’s petrochemical industry, said she can understand the concern over delays but stressed that evaluations need to take however long they need to take. The EPA needs to be confident about a chemical before approving it, especially for the sake of worker safety, she said. 

“Very complex issues are going to take longer than not very complex issues, especially with the federal government gutting experts in all the agencies, including the EPA, over the last year,” Culbert said. “And a big part of it anyway is that the industry doesn’t always give all the information needed right away.”

After a chemical is submitted for review, Culbert said a hasty approval for an industry company may hinge on the EPA overlooking missing information in the paperwork. The company might initially submit only data on the chemical that will pass review and leave out any information that may harm the chances of approval. 

This can lead to a lengthy back and forth between the EPA and the company.

Additionally, the Trump administration cut the EPA’s budget by 4% compared to fiscal 2025. Initially, the administration proposed cutting the agency by more than 50%. 

She also pointed out that with these changes, the EPA may report only some aspects of a certain new chemical to facilities, which is worrisome to  Culbert. Facility workers, she said, should be made aware of the presence of even trace amounts of a substance before handling it. 

Chitalia, the Environmental Defense Fund attorney, agrees the 90-day process is a moot point, and emphasized that as the Toxic Substances Control Act functions, the EPA is required to prove a chemical doesn’t pose an unreasonable risk. Now, instead, the EPA must prove that a chemical would likely pose an unreasonable risk. 

“And a big issue in the draft is that it kind of flips the safety standard on its head,” Chitalia said. “The bill now invites industry data and industry input in their data review processes, so it’s no longer an independent review coming from the agency. There are vested interests that can now participate in the process.” 

Other Chemical Rollbacks 

The recent House draft bill is not the first challenge to the Toxic Substances Control Act. 

After the Toxic Substances Control Act amendment passed in 2016, the EPA began reevaluating the risk of chemicals that fell through the cracks when the 1976 version of the legislation was in effect. This included chemicals such as perchloroethylene, trichloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride — all of which were found in the groundwater at the Jones Road Superfund site. 

These chemicals have historically been used in solvent mixtures for dry cleaning operations and certain chemical facilities. The chemicals are hazardous to human health — trichloroethylene is a known carcinogen linked to several types of cancer, including kidney cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. 

The EPA had issued a final rule banning the manufacturing, processing and distribution of trichloroethylene in commerce for all uses with more stringent worker protections while the chemical is phased out. The agency also banned some uses of perchloroethylene and carbon tetrachloride. 

Industry groups responded with over two dozen lawsuits, which have largely been successful. The groups included the American Chemistry Council, Texas Chemistry Council and Olin Corporation, a global manufacturer and distributor of chemical products. Olin operates a chemical facility about 60 miles west of Houston in Freeport, Texas, that uses all three chemicals, according to data collected from the Environmental Defense Fund. The petitioners argued that the rulings were an overreach by the EPA. 

For Medcalf, the pushback from industry is upsetting, but not surprising. The updated regulations for the three chemicals had been a good start for her and other environmental advocates. She had been following the Toxic Substances Control Act changes and rollbacks for years, especially the chemicals linked to the Jones Road groundwater plume. The chemicals are also found at chemical facilities in the Houston area. 

“As long as these compounds are being manufactured and being circulated in our country, in our communities, there’s going to be a risk for exposure,” Medcalf said. 

The trichloroethylene rule was initially intended to take effect in January of this year but, due to legal pressure from chemical companies and industry groups, the EPA has pushed the effective date for some of these restrictions until mid-May. Additionally, the EPA has signaled its plans to reconsider parts of the rule.

The EPA is also reconsidering its final risk evaluation to further regulate perchloroethylene. The new rule is not expected to be released until 2027 and, in the meantime, industry will follow current pre-amendment, nonupdated regulations for the chemical. The EPA is reconsidering its initial rule on carbon tetrachloride as well, with no expected deadline yet in place yet. 

In a statement to Capital & Main, the American Chemistry Council said that the new regulations for the three chemicals “mandate infeasible requirements, create unwarranted compliance burdens, or risk supply chain disruption without commensurate public health benefit.”

Olin Corporation did not respond to requests for comment. 

The Environmental Defense Fund recently filed comments on EPA’s recent reconsideration of formaldehyde, a gas and chemical compound with various health risks, after the agency published a final more stringent evaluation in 2024 — another reversal by the EPA. 

Chitalia is expecting more reversals could be on the way. 

“These priority chemicals are the reason why those 2016 amendments happened,” Chitalia said. “They’re so important and they’re so necessary because it really shows what gets through the cracks of a law when it doesn’t work.” 

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