Trump Admin Targets Biden-Era Chemical Safety Regs
The Trump administration has settled on its first Clean Air Act rule for a possible rollback: a package of regulations strengthened last year to better head off accidents at thousands of facilities that use or store dangerous chemicals.
In a filing Thursday morning, agency attorneys asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to freeze proceedings in legal challenges to those Biden-era regulations while agency staff get to work on a replacement.
The filing cites only the “new administration’s policy priorities” as grounds for undertaking the new rulemaking and does not state an objective. But “we can only assume that it means a rollback or weakening” of the regulations, Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, said in an interview.
Assuming the court agrees to EPA’s bid, the agency’s goal is to publish the replacement rule by late next year, Steven Cook, deputy assistant administrator of the Office of Land and Emergency Management, wrote in an accompanying declaration. The public will have the chance to weigh in on a draft version, Cook indicated.
"The new rulemaking may obviate the need for judicial resolution of some or all of the disputed issues in this case," he told the court.
The new administration’s reversal will also prolong an intermittent tug-of-war that now spans the better part of a decade.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, his appointees largely repealed a 2017 attempt to toughen the regulations, which apply to refineries, water treatment works and other operations that have to file risk management plans.
Under former President Joe Biden, EPA responded last year with a new set of RMP regulations that in some respects went further than the 2017 version.
For the first time, for example, industries and other operations are supposed to account for the risks posed by higher odds of flooding and other perils tied to climate change. Some must also implement safer alternatives to their existing procedures.
They will “protect some of our most vulnerable populations that have been overburdened by industrial pollution for far too long,” then-Deputy EPA Administrator Janet McCabe said early last year.
But Republican-run states and business organizations are fighting the stricter regulations in the D.C. Circuit ligation. In a January letter, industry trade groups urged EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to take immediate action to fix what they termed “misguided and illegal” requirements in advance of a 2027 compliance deadline.
At EPA, spokesperson Molly Vaseliou had no comment Thursday when asked whether that plea prompted Zeldin’s decision to revisit the regulations.
In referring questions back to Thursday’s court filing, Vaseliou also did not say whether EPA would accede to a related industry request to scrap a website that makes individual companies’ risk management plans partly available online.
A representative of the American Chemistry Council, which has been a leading voice in favor of changes, had no immediate comment.
The regulations are among an array of air rules issued under Biden that EPA could now revisit. Others include a stronger annual soot exposure limit and stricter standards on power plant releases of greenhouse gases and hazardous air pollutants.
A separate coalition of industry lobbies mentioned both sets of regulations this week in an endorsement of Aaron Szabo, whom Trump has nominated to head EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.
Szabo, they wrote in a letter to members of a Senate committee, “will work with Administrator Zeldin tirelessly to implement President Trump’s smart regulatory policy that aims to put America first.”