A top Republican on the Senate environment committee is strongly opposing Democrats’ latest bill to ban asbestos uses, arguing during a June 9 hearing that OSHA and EPA should address the material’s risks through rulemaking instead of legislation, in a sign the measure faces an uphill battle to win bipartisan support needed to break any filibuster.
November 15, 2026
Maria Hegstad
Maria Hegstad is managing editor of Inside EPA’s Risk Policy Report, where she has been writing about all things chemicals, risk assessment policy and toxicology since 2008. Before joining Inside EPA, Maria reported for local newspapers in Manassas, VA, and D.C., covering courts and local government. Maria is a proud native of the “other” Washington, raised in Tacoma. She earned her BA from the College of William & Mary and her MSJ from Medill.
Archived Articles
EPA has quietly released workplace exposure limits for five chemicals that will be subject to upcoming TSCA rules, appearing to lay the groundwork not just for those proposals but also a potential reversal on trichloroethylene (TCE), where the agency has prepared two limits -- one based on the Trump-era risk determination and a stricter second option using research the prior administration rejected.
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Unions, environmentalists and a slew of academics and former OSHA officials are urging EPA to stand behind its reversals of Trump-era TSCA policies governing evaluation of workplace chemical exposures, arguing that an industry call to unwind the new stances is based on “myths” about existing worker-safety rules and voluntary protections.
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Agriculture groups are raising new claims that EPA’s draft hazard assessment of formaldehyde downplayed or even ignored the ubiquitous chemical’s use in “animal industries,” and failed to gather input from the Agriculture Department (USDA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the two agencies most familiar with those sectors.
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Democrats have introduced their latest bill seeking to ban all uses of asbestos, but its prospects appear uncertain at best as it is even stricter than a 2019 version that collapsed without a vote, including a phaseout schedule mirroring EPA’s proposed TSCA rule that industry opposes and a definition of commercial “asbestos” similar to what has divided supporters of past legislation.
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Paint and pigment trade groups are saying EPA’s new policy of assuming workers will not use protective gear in TSCA risk evaluations is “illegal” and irrational, charging that the agency has improperly ignored existing workplace practices and OSHA safety standards as well as companies’ general duty to protect their workers from “recognized” dangers.
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Industry lawyers are raising broad concerns that strict worker safety standards and other provisions in EPA’s recently proposed TSCA ban on chrysotile asbestos uses signals the agency is take a tougher approach than OSHA and other federal agencies, raising questions about which agency has primacy over workplace safety.
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The chemical industry is praising what it says are recent moves by EPA to consult OSHA and other work-safety agencies to bolster the TSCA office’s approach to occupational exposure and risk analysis, while pursuing its own efforts to harmonize approaches to that discipline used by the toxics program, industrial hygienists and occupational regulators.
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EPA’s draft finding that formaldehyde exposures can lead to leukemia drew a range of reactions from other federal entities that reviewed a pre-release draft with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) leading praise of the cancer analysis while others warned that they see evidence of that link as more tenuous than the agency is claiming.
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EPA’s just-released draft risk assessment of formaldehyde links the chemical to myeloid leukemia based on a controversial study of workplace exposures, but does not use that finding in its cancer risk estimate due to modeling data uncertainty, resulting in a risk value that is an order of magnitude less strict than in 2010 and very close to its last final review in 1991.
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