The chemical industry has finally fulfilled that wish.
Industry lobbyists have long urged the federal government to adopt a less stringent approach to assessing cancer risks from chemicals that would lead to less regulation for companies that make or use chemicals.
Last week, in a highly unusual move, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was adopting that approach and revising its assessment of the health risks posed by formaldehyde, a widespread pollutant that causes far more cancers than any other chemical in the air. Working on this effort were two former industry officials who are now EPA executives.
The revised assessment announced Wednesday nearly doubles the amount of formaldehyde considered safe to inhale compared to the one finalized in the final weeks of the Biden administration. A ProPublica investigation released last year found that even that older assessment significantly underestimated the dangers posed by formaldehyde.
Under previous Republican and Democratic administrations, EPA scientists were instructed to assume that chemicals that damage DNA and cause cancer (the largest group of carcinogens, including formaldehyde) pose a “linear” risk. This means that even small amounts of exposure can be dangerous. The agency adopted this approach nearly 40 years ago to protect against the many low-level cancer threats that the public faces every day. However, the industry’s preferred method assumes that certain carcinogens pose no risk at low levels and should only be considered a risk when exposure reaches a certain threshold.
The Trump administration has already criticized the use of linear models to calculate radiation cancer risks and may eliminate their use in testing for other chemicals.
The EPA’s adoption of this threshold model for formaldehyde may not be all that surprising given that some of the scientists who promoted this approach on behalf of companies now run the agency.
They include Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleba, who previously worked at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main trade group. The council represents more than 190 companies and has vigorously opposed the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde. As recently as 2022, Dekleba, then the industry group’s senior director of chemicals and technology, sent a letter to EPA scientists advocating the use of a threshold approach to evaluating chemicals. The EPA subsequently reviewed and rejected the proposal. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine independently reviewed the decision and supported it.
Mr. Decleba currently serves as Deputy Assistant Administrator for the EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, where he conducted the formaldehyde evaluation. Beck, the principal deputy administrator who runs the office, signed the agency’s official memo outlining the changes.
Under federal conflict of interest rules, EPA employees are prohibited for one year from working on certain matters involving or representing a former employer without first obtaining written permission from the agency’s Office of Ethics. Beck and Dekleba did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked about Dekleba and Beck’s involvement in the agency’s recent decision to change the agency’s approach to formaldehyde risks, an EPA spokesperson said in an email to ProPublica that Beck and Beck received ethics advice from the agency that approved their work on the issue. “Formaldehyde is produced by many manufacturers and used in many industrial sectors, so this risk assessment is not a party-specific issue that raises concerns under federal ethics rules,” the spokesperson wrote.
A spokesperson explained that the change in formaldehyde assessment was a correction of a past scientific error. “Through a rigorous peer review process, we determined that the Biden administration used a flawed analysis in its formaldehyde risk assessment,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are amending the record to reflect the best available science and our core legal obligations.”
An assessment released under the Biden administration found 58 situations where workers or consumers faced unreasonable health risks from formaldehyde, which the designation requires authorities to reduce. Items that can emit dangerous levels of chemicals include car care products such as car wax, as well as craft supplies, ink and toner, photography supplies and fabrics, building materials, textiles, and leather products. The EPA is seeking to overturn findings that formaldehyde poses an unreasonable health risk in five situations and leaves dozens more unaddressed. One of these five is related to the manufacture of wood products.
The agency argues that the formaldehyde levels that EPA now says are acceptable under the revised assessment will protect people from cancer and other harmful effects, including asthma, miscarriage, and fertility problems.
But environmentalists say the Trump administration’s change in policy on cancer risk reflects industry’s influence over government agencies.
“The science around formaldehyde hasn’t changed. These are the same arguments the chemical industry has been promoting for the past decade,” said Jonathan Calmes-Katz, an attorney at Earthjustice, the nation’s largest public interest environmental law firm. “The only difference is that we finally found an administration willing to ignore the findings of its own scientists.”
For decades, formaldehyde has been at the center of a bitter battle between industry and regulators. The chemical, considered the backbone of American commerce, is used in everything from bonding particleboard in furniture to building blocks for plastics and preserving human remains, and has strong advocates in many fields.
Our research found significant levels of formaldehyde inside cars, stores and homes. ProPublica’s analysis of EPA data also found that in every census block across the country, the lifetime risk of cancer from exposure to formaldehyde in outdoor air is higher than the agency’s goal for air pollutants of 1 in 1 million people developing cancer. According to our analysis, approximately 320 million people (nearly all Americans) live in areas of the United States where the lifetime cancer risk from outdoor formaldehyde exposure is 10 times higher than agency ideals.
As of last year, the EPA’s official estimate was that the average risk from formaldehyde in the air was 20 times the limit. However, as our study found, this number does not reflect the risk of myeloid leukemia, a potentially fatal blood cancer. (EPA scientists calculated that risk, but excluded it from the final numbers because of internal debate about its certainty.) When myeloid leukemia is included, formaldehyde’s cancer risk jumps to 77 times the threshold.
Former EPA veterans are concerned that the threshold approach to assessing cancer risk could be applied to weaken health-based protections for other carcinogens. “This is going to open the floodgates,” said Tracy Woodruff, a scientist at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, who worked at the EPA for 13 years. “Chemical companies want all carcinogens to be considered to meet the carcinogenicity threshold so they can say their chemicals are safe even when they know that’s not true.”
The agency is developing risk assessments for other potentially carcinogenic chemicals used in plastics manufacturing, such as 1,2-dichloroethane and 1,3-butadiene. These decisions are particularly important because states will be prohibited from issuing their own protections for the same chemical once EPA finalizes the rule based on its evaluation.
EPA can finalize the proposed formaldehyde rating changes after the public comment period ends on February 2nd. Regulations would then need to be issued to address the unreasonable risks posed by this chemical.
The Trump administration also aims to take a linear approach to radiation cancer risks. A presidential order issued in May deemed flaws in the method used to assess the cancer risks of chemicals and directed the Nuclear Regulation Authority to consider adopting new radiation exposure limits. President Trump’s blueprint, Project 2025, similarly calls on the Environmental Protection Agency, which handles radiation, to reevaluate its past linear approach to radiation-related cancer risks. The EPA Press Office did not respond to questions about whether this work is underway.
The new revisions to the formaldehyde assessment represent a complete break with the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), the EPA program that quantified health risks from formaldehyde last year. Previously, reports such as formaldehyde assessments conducted under the federal chemical law known as the Toxic Substances Control Act relied on values calculated by IRIS. But the EPA, in what appears to be the agency’s first action, rejected the levels the program calculated for the chemical last year.
Retirement of IRIS is another item on the chemical industry’s wish list, and with the EPA’s latest changes to formaldehyde, this too appears to be nearly complete. Project 2025 called for the program to be abolished. ProPublica revealed in October that of the 55 scientists involved in the recent evaluation, only eight remained in their jobs following the agency’s reorganization. EPA has not yet released the latest IRIS report, a toxicity assessment of the permanent chemical PFNA, which was finalized in April.
EPA did not respond to questions regarding the expected release date of the PFNA assessment or the status of the program.
