Trump appointees barred EPA staff from warning Senate about ‘forever chemical’ loophole:
Internal staff messages
Trump administration officials barred experts from warning legislators that they were about to write a major environmental loophole into law, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staffers alleged in newly revealed internal communications.
The loophole, arising from a clause in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), enabled many companies to avoid disclosing releases of toxic “forever chemicals” to the EPA.
Internal EPA correspondence obtained by The Hill shows that career staff members attempted to make Congress aware of the issue, but they believe their efforts were rebuffed by political appointees.
One employee lamented that career staff “had tried to tell” the Senate about the problem, but he could not get approval to do so.
The clause at issue, written by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (SEPW), said on Jan. 1, 2020, some of the chemicals — also known as PFAS — must be included in the EPA’s reporting database for toxic chemical releases: the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).
But while the clause specified an annual reporting threshold for the compounds, it did not indicate whether Congress intended to deem them “chemicals of special concern,” as opposed to the baseline “standard chemical” label.
Without the stricter designation, polluters could hide their discharges under an exemption intended for chemicals released in small proportions, called “de minimis” concentrations.
Some EPA experts wanted to point this out to Senate staffers but said they were blocked from doing so.
In August 2019, EPA career official David Turk wrote that his team “noticed some nuances that we had not considered previously that might be worth raising to [Senate] staff.”
Turk, head of the data-gathering and analysis division within the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics (OPPT), expressed concern that under the NDAA as drafted, companies would be able to get out of reporting their PFAS discharges if they only made up a small percentage of the total discharge.
“Note that in contacting SEPW staff, we do not plan to take a position on this issue, but rather would like to convey a consideration that we had failed to raise previously,” Turk wrote.
His colleague Daniel Bushman, who at the time served as TRI petitions coordinator and chemical list manager, added that “the fix could be as simple as the bill just saying to add PFAS to the list of chemicals of special concern with a 100 pound reporting threshold.”
Known for their persistence in the body and the environment, PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have been linked to cancers and other serious illnesses. They are present in household items such as nonstick pans, cosmetics and waterproof apparel, and in certain types of firefighting foam.
With no direction otherwise from the NDAA, the EPA’s toxics branch codified 172 types of PFAS as standard chemicals and thereby opened the reporting loophole — publishing an initial version of the rule in May 2020 and finalizing it a month later.
Under this classification, if levels of PFOA, a particularly toxic type of PFAS, constituted less than 0.1 percent of a given mixture, or if those of the other 171 kinds of the toxic compounds were below 1 percent, sites would be exempt from disclosing their discharge. Given that even unsafe levels of PFAS generally occur in comparatively tiny quantities, the classification meant that hardly any facilities would need to file a report.
Bureaucratic breakdown
EPA experts from the Toxics Release Inventory Program had recognized the problem nearly a year before — but found themselves talking to a brick wall built by the Trump administration, according to the internal correspondence.
The experts recalled trying to inform the Senate committee that the language they were incorporating would not likely lead to stricter PFAS release reporting.
But these messages apparently never reached their intended recipients.
“Starting in late July 2019 we became aware of this issue and tried to raise it with Michal on multiple occasions,” Turk wrote in a June 10, 2020, email chain.
Turk was referring to Michal Freedhoff, who at the time served as minority director of oversight — a Democratic staffer — for the Senate committee.
That same day in 2020, Turk made similar remarks to another colleague, Stephanie Griffin, noting that “SEPW staff is pissed that we didn’t tell them about the whole chemicals of special concern issue.”
“We had tried to tell them,” he continued. “It’s all very awkward.”
Asked by Griffin where the breakdown in communication occurred, Turk said that it was “initially, Mark Hartman. And then Nancy Beck.”
Mark Hartman, the OPPT’s deputy director of programs, is a career official. Nancy Beck was a Trump appointee who served as deputy and then principal deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), which houses the OPPT. Prior to taking on the EPA role, Beck worked for five years as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry lobbying group.
In his exchange with Griffin, Turk then recounted a situation in which he and his colleagues were blocked from sharing the issue with the Senate committee.
“Then we finally did get approval to include it in materials to send to Nancy that she might then send to SEPW, which we knew she wouldn’t send to them,” Turk added.
The “awkwardness” Turk referred to stemmed from an email sent earlier that day from Freedhoff to Sven-Erik Kaiser of the EPA’s Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations, expressing shock that the May prepublication labeled PFAS as standard chemicals. The designation, she noted, could make PFAS “eligible for the de minimis concentration exemption.”
“To get around TRI reporting for a listed PFAS chemical, all one would need to do is dilute the 100 lbs in 10,000 lbs of something else,” Freedhoff wrote. “This is not what Congress intended — we intended for reporting to occur for all releases that exceeded 100 lbs.”
She stressed that the purpose of the NDAA clause “was certainly NOT to allow an entity to avoid reporting in the first place.”
A significant portion of the June 11 communications among Turk and his colleagues were redacted under Freedom of Information Act procedures. But one visible portion affirmed Freedhoff’s assertions that EPA staffers never warned her that the NDAA language could prevent PFAS from being listed as chemicals of special concern.
“We did not have direct interactions with Michal and did not control the delivery of information to Michal,” Turk added. “It appears that our messages on the topic never did reach her.”
Slipping through the cracks
Correspondence from 2019 shows that career EPA staffers made multiple attempts to warn Freedhoff about the loophole.
(more)
https://thehill.com/business/4583687-epa-forever-chemicals-pfas-loophole-trump-appointees-barred-staff-warning-senate-internal-messages/
