The EPA Will Likely Gut Team That Studies Health Risks From Chemicals

In early May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would split up the agency’s main arm devoted to scientific research. According to a report from NPR, scientists at the 1,500-person Office of Research and Development were told to apply to roughly 500 new scientific research positions that would be sprinkled into other areas of the agency—and to expect further cuts to their organization in the weeks to come.

This reorganization threatens the existence of a tiny but crucial program housed within this office: the Integrated Risk Information System Program, commonly referred to as IRIS. This program is responsible for providing independent research on the risks of chemicals, helping other offices within the agency set regulations for chemicals and compounds that could pose a danger to human health. The program’s leader departed recently, ahead of the restructuring announcement.

The EPA’s reorganization, experts say, will likely break up this crucial program—which has been targeted for decades by the chemical industry and right-wing interests.

“Unfortunately, right now, it looks like the polluters won,” says Thomas Burke, the founder and emeritus director of the Johns Hopkins Risk Sciences and Public Policy Institute and a former deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development.

“The May 2 announcement is all part of a larger, comprehensive effort to restructure the entire agency,” EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou told WIRED in an email. “EPA is working expeditiously through the reorganization process and will provide additional information when it’s available.”

Formed in the mid-1980s, the IRIS program was designed to investigate the health impacts of chemicals, collating the best available research from across the world to provide analyses of potential hazards from new and existing substances. The program confers with other offices within the EPA to identify top chemicals of concern that merit further research and study.

Unlike other offices in the EPA, the IRIS program has no regulatory responsibilities; rather, it exists solely to provide science on which to base potential new regulations. Experts say this insulates IRIS-produced assessments from outside pressures that could influence research done in other areas of the agency.

“There’s independence” in being in a centralized program like IRIS, says Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, also a former principal deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Research and Development and a former EPA science adviser. “They’re not trying to evaluate risk for a specific purpose. They’re just evaluating risk and providing fundamental information.”

Since its inception, IRIS has created a database of more than 570 chemicals and compounds with assessments of their potential human health effects. This body of research underpins not just federal policy, but helps guide state and international regulations as well.

The IRIS database is the “gold standard for health assessments for chemical pollutants,” says Burke. “Virtually all of our regulated pollutants, virtually all of our cleanups, virtually all of our major successes in regulating toxic chemicals were touched by IRIS or the IRIS staff.”

Yet IRIS has faced a significant uphill battle in recent years. For one, there’s the sheer number of chemicals it has had to review with limited manpower. There are more than 80,000 chemicals that have been registered for use in the US, and chemical companies register hundreds more each year. Some of the chemicals IRIS is working to research have been substances of concern for years, while some have more recently drawn new scrutiny. For instance, forever chemicals—synthetic materials so named because of their persistence in the environment—have been in use for decades, but their recent prevalence in tests of water and soil prompted IRIS in 2019 to begin creating draft assessments for five common types of these chemicals.