Senate Subcommittee Examines Beneficial Use And Regulation Of Chemicals

On October 23, 2025, the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Chemical Safety, Waste Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight held a hearing on "Examining the Beneficial Use and Regulation of Chemicals." The Subcommittee heard from the following witnesses:

• Peter Huntsman, President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Huntsman Corporation (written testimony);

• Dr. Gwen Gross, Senior Technical Fellow, The Boeing Company (written testimony); and

• Dr. Tracey Woodruff, Professor and Director, Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, University of California, San Francisco (written testimony).

Woodruff testified first, stating that a stronger Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is necessary, one that provides incentives for industry to develop new chemicals that will not harm human health or the environment. According to Woodruff, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has granted more than 600 low volume exemptions (LVE) for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and approved a new chemical for use in jet and boat fuel "that has a cancer risk so high that nearly every person who is exposed to this chemical through foreseeable uses is expected to develop cancer."

Huntsman stated that EPA's review of new chemicals "routinely" exceeds the statutory 90-day period, prompting industry to consider moving its research and development (R&D) outside the United States to remain competitive. Huntsman testified that the United States needs a science-based regulatory system that is focused on real world exposures and not hypothetical hazards.

Gross described the process Boeing uses to ensure that the chemicals that it uses in its designs will perform as intended, stating that aerospace companies need time to find viable alternatives when a chemical is phased out. Gross stated that delays in new chemical reviews are also an issue and that sometimes Boeing will remove an R&D chemical from consideration due to uncertainty about if and when EPA would approve it. Gross noted that the duration of Boeing's development process will span multiple administrations, yet midway through, there will be regulatory changes that will need to be addressed. For Boeing, as a downstream user rather than a new chemical manufacturer, there is a lack of transparency in the new chemical review process.

Committee and Subcommittee members asked witnesses about maintaining safety standards while remaining competitive globally. Huntsman stated that to be globally competitive, U.S. industry needs to be able to create new chemicals, go through a thorough review, and obtain regulatory approval. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) noted that countries with robust chemical safety programs, such as the European Union and Japan, are approving new chemicals that could have been commercialized in the United States. Capito asked Huntsman, given that EPA imposes more restrictive conditions and takes longer to do it, what effect that has on where Huntsman chooses to invest and produce its chemicals. Huntsman responded that, to the best of his knowledge, the Company has about 450 new chemicals waiting for approval under TSCA, with ten percent expected to be approved within the 90-day time period, about 40 percent likely to take longer than one year, and the rest taking up to two to three years. In contrast, according to Huntsman, a country like China would make these approvals a high priority and complete them within 90 days.

In response to a question from Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Woodruff testified that sometimes toxic chemicals are approved due to political interference. Merkley stated that he understands that EPA is unable to meet its deadlines under TSCA for two reasons — understaffing at EPA compared to the number of new chemicals to be reviewed and rework required when companies make incomplete submissions.

Commentary

Bergeson & Campbell, P.C. (B&C^®) is again encouraged by the fact that the Senate is devoting time and attention to the critical role that chemicals play in our daily lives, and the imperative for some adjustments to the manner in which the United States regulates chemicals to ensure their safe use in commerce. B&C is further pleased to hear Merkley acknowledge that TSCA — in its current form — is not perfect, and express openness to additional legislative improvements. Potential tweaks to the 2016 law will be top of mind for many in the next several months as the fee authorization provisions are set to expire in June 2026, which could further constrain the available resources EPA needs to be successful in its implementation efforts. Such a lapse could slow the pace of new chemical review even further. The Coalition for Chemical Innovations (CCI), for example, which B&C helps to coordinate and manage, has been advocating for common sense policy changes that would incentivize chemical innovation and promote the development and use of new, greener, and safer chemicals.

These views were amplified by Huntsman and Gross as they explained their individual experiences dealing with slow, inconsistent, costly, and unpredictable regulatory processes in the United States. B&C is compelled by their powerful explanations of how the current status quo can lead to abandonment of a company's plans or intentions to introduce promising new technologies domestically and/or the offshoring of activities to foreign countries (including potentially foreign adversaries) where the business and regulatory environments are more reasonable and efficient. B&C also shares Capito's view, however, that the United States should not be engaged in an "international race to the bottom." No one would advocate for EPA to simply rubber-stamp unsafe chemistries. The problem is that inefficiencies and conservative approaches applied in the current process are actually disincentivizing the introduction of newer, better, and safer ones.

Woodruff also seemed to support a federal chemical regulatory framework that would better incentivize companies to produce safer chemicals. B&C finds Woodruff's views and examples of how the program was falling short, however, to be unpersuasive. Woodruff, for example, highlighted the large number of PFAS chemicals that had been approved through the TSCA new chemicals program for low volume uses. Woodruff did not mention, however, that those approvals happened many years ago, prior to the Lautenberg amendments, when the Agency knew even less about PFAS risks and the prevailing science pointed to concerns for just PFAS of the longer-chain variety. Woodruff also failed to mention that, for years now, Agency practice has been to deny such chemicals — a practice now codified in the Agency's procedural regulations for review of new chemicals — and that EPA has initiated a stewardship program to encourage companies to relinquish those approvals. Moreover, EPA will soon propose widely anticipated updates to a PFAS reporting rule that could form the basis of further action on PFAS under TSCA Section 6. While B&C shares the bipartisan concerns regarding the widespread presence of PFAS in the environment, we view this series of events on PFAS LVEs as more indicative of a healthy and functioning TSCA, where decisions are made on the best science available at that time and EPA has the tools and authority to adjust its response as appropriate moving forward.

In another example, Woodruff mentioned an instance of EPA approving new chemicals (notably submitted during the Biden Administration) for use in fuel mixtures despite EPA's own risk assessment indicating a very high cancer risk — an issue that was publicly documented by investigative journalists and ultimately became the subject of litigation. EPA has since taken the rare (perhaps unprecedented) step of withdrawing its orders that would have allowed the company to commence manufacture, and is currently redoing its risk assessment. The record in the litigation is clear, however, that EPA is taking this step not because of a sudden concern that it may have inadvertently let a cancer-causing chemical into the gas tanks of boats and jets, but because it believes its prior conclusions, based on screening-level methods and conservative assumptions, were likely a gross overestimate of actual risk. Time will tell how the re-do of these risk assessments shakes out, but B&C expects the takeaway will confirm what is already known: that EPA's current risk assessment approaches in the TSCA new chemicals program are overly conservative, and that significant opportunities exist to improve the process in ways that better reflect the best available science while ensuring protections against real threats to health and the environment.