Under Former Chemical Industry Insiders, Trump EPA Nearly Doubles Amount of Formaldehyde Considered Safe to Inhale

The chemical industry finally got its wish.

Industry lobbyists have long pushed the federal government to adopt a less stringent approach to gauging the cancer risk from chemicals, one that would help ease regulations on companies that make or use them.

Last week, in a highly unusual move, the Environmental Protection Agency embraced that approach in announcing that it is revising an assessment of the health dangers posed by formaldehyde, a widespread pollutant that causes far more cancer than any other chemical in the air. Working on that effort were two of those former industry insiders, who are now top EPA officials.

The proposed revisions to the assessment, released Wednesday, nearly double the amount of formaldehyde considered safe to inhale compared with the version that was finalized in the last weeks of the Biden administration. Even that older assessment significantly underestimated the dangers posed by formaldehyde, a ProPublica investigation published last year found.

Under previous Republican and Democratic administrations, EPA scientists were instructed to assume that chemicals that cause cancer by damaging DNA — the largest group of carcinogens, which includes formaldehyde — pose a “linear” risk, meaning that even small exposures can be dangerous. The agency adopted the approach almost 40 years ago to protect against the multitude of low-level cancer threats the public faces daily. But the industry’s favored method assumes that certain carcinogens pose no risk at lower levels and that the danger should only be considered once exposure reaches a certain threshold.

The Trump administration has already criticized the use of the linear model for calculating the risk of cancer from radiation and could scrap its use in examining other chemicals.