\n The current and former employees who spoke to CNN said finding risks during chemical safety reviews can lead to regulation. Conversely, when risk disappears, so does the need to regulate, they say.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cEvery decision is going to the political level, down to the smallest detail. That is abnormal,\u201d a scientist who recently left the agency\u2019s chemical division told CNN.\n <\/p>\n
\n Scientists say they no longer feel safe pushing back, pointing to termination of federal union contracts and the suspension of employees who signed dissent letters.<\/a>\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou have to follow instructions,\u201d one career employee said. \u201cOtherwise, that\u2019s insubordination.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n In a statement to CNN, the EPA defended its science.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cEPA is implementing the President\u2019s Executive Order on Restoring Gold Standard Science across its risk evaluations,\u201d the statement said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIn practice, that means using realistic exposure scenarios rather than defaulting to compounded worst-case assumptions, being transparent about the assumptions and uncertainties in every analysis, and ensuring conclusions are testable and reproducible,\u201d the agency said in an email to CNN.\n <\/p>\n \n The agency also added that its \u201ctop priority is protecting the health of all Americans, and every chemical safety decision the agency makes is grounded in gold-standard science: peer-reviewed literature, validated test methods, real-world monitoring data, and fit-for-purpose exposure and fate modeling.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n But career employees described a growing gap between career staff and the Trump administration\u2019s political appointees over how health dangers should be defined. The appointees, they say, want to narrow what counts as risk.\n <\/p>\n \n Some senior scientists have been reassigned to administrative roles where they no longer oversee important health risk assessments, several sources said. Less experienced, newer staff who lack institutional knowledge are being put into those roles instead, and scientists are feeling forced to defend the science they\u2019re using to superiors, they added.\n <\/p>\n \n In previous administrations, \u201cthere was a level of respect and trust that the scientists were relying on the best science,\u201d the scientist who recently left the agency said.\n <\/p>\n \n But now, \u201csubject-matter experts having to explain to political appointees why they chose a particular science approach, being scrutinized for what they did, and if asked to think about it differently there\u2019s little you can do to push back if you\u2019re meeting with the top person.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Thousands of chemicals in everyday products currently on the market have never been fully assessed for their impact on human health or the environment.\n <\/p>\n \n For example, one chemical being reviewed, a silicon compound known as D4, is used in products including deodorant, hair spray and cosmetics. Up to 500 million<\/a> pounds of the solvent is produced in the US every year, but it has been banned by the European Union because it has been shown to be toxic and linked to infertility.\n <\/p>\n \n When the nation\u2019s first chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, was adopted in 1976, some 62,000 chemicals were already in production or on the market and were grandfathered in with no requirement for EPA to conduct a health risk review.\n <\/p>\n \n Many remain in consumer products today.\n <\/p>\n \n Environmental advocates say that\u2019s because the original law lacked teeth; it was nearly impossible for the EPA to effectively review already existing chemicals.\n <\/p>\n \n In 2016, the law was updated, requiring the EPA to review existing chemicals on the market to assess the potential human health risks.\n <\/p>\n \n Since early this year, the EPA has been under court-ordered deadlines to complete risk assessments for certain high-priority chemicals after environmental groups and the chemical industry sued the agency, prompting efforts to speed up the process.\n <\/p>\n \n The EPA\u2019s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is tasked, among other things, with assessing and regulating these chemicals.\n <\/p>\n \n The agency proposed a new rule last year with respect to the Toxic Substances Control Act that streamlines the review process, which advocates said would weaken oversight, shorten reviews and discount real-world exposures that threaten communities across the country.\n <\/p>\n \n Now, pressure is being applied at multiple points in the assessment process, three of the sources said. They describe a pattern of internal meetings rapidly convened by superiors at the first sign of potential health risks for a chemical in the early stages of scientists\u2019 review process, where scientists feel forced to defend preliminary findings before the analysis is complete. Some of these meetings are attended by political appointees the administration has placed in leadership roles in the chemical assessment office.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThey don\u2019t even let you finish\u201d the risk analysis, one EPA staffer said. \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019ve got to brief immediately on the risk that you found.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt\u2019s more like, \u2018How can we fix this? What can we do to make this risk go away?\u2019\u201d the staffer said.\n <\/p>\n \n A second career employee echoed that experience: \u201cBasically, the moment you calculate risk, there\u2019s some sort of meeting and they push you to figure out how we can make the risk disappear .\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n EPA employees also told CNN that agency leadership is effectively ignoring how certain racial groups could be more susceptible to harm from a particular chemical because of higher rates of underlying health conditions or physiological or genetic factors.\n <\/p>\n \n They said that type of analysis was deemed \u201cDEI\u201d and removed from assessments, a characterization scientists dispute, saying it reflects longstanding scientific methods for evaluating risk across populations.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou can\u2019t put any kind of racial comments in there,\u201d one of the career EPA employees said. \u201cWhich is ridiculous because we know certain races have predispositions to certain diseases.\u201d That predisposition may make them more sensitive to certain chemicals.\n <\/p>\n \n Michal Freedhoff, who was assistant administrator for the EPA\u2019s chemical safety office under then-President Joe Biden and helped lead negotiations to revise the chemical safety law in 2016, told CNN: \u201cThe law explicitly requires an assessment of risk to potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations \u2013 if there was direction to categorically ignore that part of the law for some or all subpopulations, that could leave people less safe and create legal vulnerabilities for the agency. \u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The EPA did not comment when asked about allegations of ignoring racial considerations.\n <\/p>\n \n Among the top officials fueling these changes, sources said, are several former chemical industry lobbyists who run the offices that regulate and conduct safety reviews of existing chemicals and new ones coming on the market.\n <\/p>\n \n One EPA employee described the political appointees as \u201cputting their thumbs on the scales\u201d for the reviews in an industry friendly direction.\n <\/p>\n \n For example, Nancy Beck, now the principal deputy assistant administrator, previously held senior positions at the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group.\n <\/p>\n \n According to the source, Beck was the driving force behind revising a risk assessment of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.\n <\/p>\n \n EPA\u2019s human health risk assessment of the chemical \u201cwas finalized in December 2024 before she came, and she specifically reopened it,\u201d the source said.\n <\/p>\n \n Once the assessment was reopened, the Trump EPA proposed late last year nearly doubling what\u2019s considered safe exposure levels of formaldehyde \u2013 a big win for the chemical industry. Beck\u2019s name appears in the EPA\u2019s notice seeking public input.\n <\/p>\n \n The agency has yet to issue final regulations.\n <\/p>\n \n Beck did not respond to CNN\u2019s email asking her directly about the formaldehyde issue.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cNancy Beck is in the weeds. She reads every word. Looks at every science research. And so there is absolutely political pressure, because she\u2019s in there looking at everything,\u201d the employee who recently left the agency\u2019s chemical division added.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe level of scrutiny of scientists\u2019 work and the granular details is unprecedented,\u201d the person said.\n <\/p>\n \n The EPA did not comment when asked about allegations of political interference.\n <\/p>\n \n Several employees pointed to a February training session as evidence of changes to the risk assessment process. A video of that session was obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and shared with CNN. PEER is a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of public employees and whistleblowers on environmental issues.\n <\/p>\n \n The training was intended to be a reset for how the chemical safety division does its work, and a primer for newly reassigned EPA scientists following the Trump administration\u2019s reorganization.\n <\/p>\n \n A human health risk assessment for a chemical is supposed to ask how much harm a chemical could cause, under what circumstances, and what risk management should be done.\n <\/p>\n \n In the training, staff were told: \u201cRisk is not a number; risk assessment is a process. It\u2019s a narrative,\u201d which those who spoke to CNN believed was another attempt to find \u201cmore wiggle room,\u201d and to \u201cexplain away any risk.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n One career employee told CNN they felt some remarks amounted \u201cexplicit instruction to make your chemical pass.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI\u2019ve never seen us try to work backward to a preordained outcome,\u201d the person said. \u201cIf anything, that\u2019s what they\u2019re doing now. They want the outcome to be that the chemical is safe.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n In a statement, the EPA pushed back on the staffers\u2019 interpretation of what was said in the training, saying they lacked \u201ctechnical context.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAny suggestion that EPA is engineering assessments toward predetermined outcomes is false,\u201d the EPA said. The statements about \u201crefining\u201d risk assumptions and portraying risk as \u201ca narrative\u201d are \u201cstandard risk-assessment practice, not a departure from it,\u201d the EPA said.\n <\/p>\n \n Even Freedhoff, the Biden EPA official who criticized some risk assessment changes, viewed the video and said she did not think the session on its face instructs scientists to alter their conclusions.\n <\/p>\n \n But EPA staff who spoke to CNN say the shift in the agency\u2019s culture goes beyond the video. Kyla Bennett of PEER said she worries the changes are significant and could extend beyond the Trump administration.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe culture within these agencies outlives the people,\u201d she said. \u201cThat culture will far outlast this administration.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n In a memo last month, the EPA also said it would move away from relying on a standalone scientific program within the agency, Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, that has traditionally been used to evaluate whether a chemical is a toxin.\n <\/p>\n \n The evaluations done by scientists within IRIS have, for decades, been used to underpin chemical risk assessments.\n <\/p>\n \n In its memo, the EPA says it will instead allow individual program offices, which are run by political appointees, to make scientific determinations about chemical hazard.\n <\/p>\n \n The memo, seen by CNN, also raises questions about past assessments completed under the old system, saying EPA departments that used IRIS as part of regulatory decision making \u201cshould review how that information was employed\u201d and \u201cdetermine if any updates or changes are warranted.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Replacing IRIS\u2019s scientific hazard assessments with analyses that weigh economic and other factors could make the science more vulnerable to political influence, one EPA staffer told CNN.\n <\/p>\n \n Since Trump took office, the EPA has made a slew of moves seen as industry friendly.\n <\/p>\n![\"GettyImages-1255264841.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/gettyimages-1255264841.jpg\")
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