Inside the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say they’re under pressure to alter safety reviews of chemicals commonly found in consumer products like household cleaners and cosmetics to make risks to human health and the environment disappear on paper.
Multiple current and former career employees at the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention recounted being pushed by supervisors to downplay the potential risk of chemicals that are already used in products on shelves.
With President Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, scientists are also being told to stop considering the impact a chemical may have on specific racial groups, according to the employees, who spoke on the condition that they remain anonymous for fear of retribution.
While the EPA told CNN it wants testing that reflects real-world exposure, some veteran employees say they have been pressed to make chemicals appear safe by coming up with test parameters that aren’t realistic.
“What we’ve been told is: ‘Let’s look at alternative scenarios,’” one employee said. If putting two hands in a chemical shows risk, this person said a supervisor might ask, “What if you dip one hand? What if you dip one finger?” in search of the smallest amount of contact needed to call it safe.
“We are considering scenarios we don’t have any basis for,” the employee said.
The EPA’s chemical safety office conducts health risk assessments for a slew of chemicals because of concerns over potential impacts on human health, such as cancer, endocrine disruption, birth defects and reproductive harm.
The concerns from scientists about their chemical review process come as Trump’s EPA has rolled back environmental and climate regulations and his administration has installed former chemical industry insiders and lobbyists to lead key agency offices overseeing chemical regulation.
The current and former employees who spoke to CNN said finding risks during chemical safety reviews can lead to regulation. Conversely, when risk disappears, so does the need to regulate, they say.
“Every decision is going to the political level, down to the smallest detail. That is abnormal,” a scientist who recently left the agency’s chemical division told CNN.
Scientists say they no longer feel safe pushing back, pointing to termination of federal union contracts and the suspension of employees who signed dissent letters.
“You have to follow instructions,” one career employee said. “Otherwise, that’s insubordination.”
In a statement to CNN, the EPA defended its science.
“EPA is implementing the President’s Executive Order on Restoring Gold Standard Science across its risk evaluations,” the statement said.
“In practice, that means using realistic exposure scenarios rather than defaulting to compounded worst-case assumptions, being transparent about the assumptions and uncertainties in every analysis, and ensuring conclusions are testable and reproducible,” the agency said in an email to CNN.
The agency also added that its “top priority is protecting the health of all Americans, and every chemical safety decision the agency makes is grounded in gold-standard science: peer-reviewed literature, validated test methods, real-world monitoring data, and fit-for-purpose exposure and fate modeling.”
But career employees described a growing gap between career staff and the Trump administration’s political appointees over how health dangers should be defined. The appointees, they say, want to narrow what counts as risk.
Some senior scientists have been reassigned to administrative roles where they no longer oversee important health risk assessments, several sources said. Less experienced, newer staff who lack institutional knowledge are being put into those roles instead, and scientists are feeling forced to defend the science they’re using to superiors, they added.
In previous administrations, “there was a level of respect and trust that the scientists were relying on the best science,” the scientist who recently left the agency said.
But now, “subject-matter experts having to explain to political appointees why they chose a particular science approach, being scrutinized for what they did, and if asked to think about it differently there’s little you can do to push back if you’re meeting with the top person.”
Changing risk assessments
Thousands of chemicals in everyday products currently on the market have never been fully assessed for their impact on human health or the environment.
For example, one chemical being reviewed, a silicon compound known as D4, is used in products including deodorant, hair spray and cosmetics. Up to 500 million pounds of the solvent is produced in the US every year, but it has been banned by the European Union because it has been shown to be toxic and linked to infertility.
When the nation’s first chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, was adopted in 1976, some 62,000 chemicals were already in production or on the market and were grandfathered in with no requirement for EPA to conduct a health risk review.
Many remain in consumer products today.
Environmental advocates say that’s because the original law lacked teeth; it was nearly impossible for the EPA to effectively review already existing chemicals.
In 2016, the law was updated, requiring the EPA to review existing chemicals on the market to assess the potential human health risks.
Currently, the EPA has been under court-ordered deadlines to complete risk assessments for certain high-priority chemicals after environmental groups and the chemical industry sued the agency, prompting efforts to speed up the process.
The EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is tasked, among other things, with assessing and regulating these chemicals.
The agency proposed a new rule last year with respect to the Toxic Substances Control Act that streamlines the review process, which advocates said would weaken oversight, shorten reviews and discount real-world exposures that threaten communities across the country.
Now, pressure is being applied at multiple points in the assessment process, three of the sources said. They describe a pattern of internal meetings rapidly convened by superiors at the first sign of potential health risks for a chemical in the early stages of scientists’ review process, where scientists feel forced to defend preliminary findings before the analysis is complete. Some of these meetings are attended by political appointees the administration has placed in leadership roles in the chemical assessment office.
“They don’t even let you finish” the risk analysis, one EPA staffer said. “It’s like you’ve got to brief immediately on the risk that you found.”
“It’s more like, ‘How can we fix this? What can we do to make this risk go away?’” the staffer said.
A second career employee echoed that experience: “Basically, the moment you calculate risk, there’s some sort of meeting and they push you to figure out how we can make the risk disappear .”
EPA employees also told CNN that agency leadership is effectively ignoring how certain racial groups could be more susceptible to harm from a particular chemical because of higher rates of underlying health conditions or physiological or genetic factors.
They said that type of analysis was deemed “DEI” and removed from assessments, a characterization scientists dispute, saying it reflects longstanding scientific methods for evaluating risk across populations.
“You can’t put any kind of racial comments in there,” one of the career EPA employees said. “Which is ridiculous because we know certain races have predispositions to certain diseases.” That predisposition may make them more sensitive to certain chemicals.
Michal Freedhoff, who was assistant administrator for the EPA’s chemical safety office under then-President Joe Biden and helped lead negotiations to revise the chemical safety law in 2016, told CNN: “The law explicitly requires an assessment of risk to potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations – if there was direction to categorically ignore that part of the law for some or all subpopulations, that could leave people less safe and create legal vulnerabilities for the agency. ”
The EPA did not comment when asked about allegations of ignoring racial considerations.
A culture change
Among the top officials fueling these changes, sources said, are several former chemical industry lobbyists who run the offices that regulate and conduct safety reviews of existing chemicals and new ones coming on the market.
One EPA employee described the political appointees as “putting their thumbs on the scales” for the reviews in an industry friendly direction.
For example, Nancy Beck, now the principal deputy assistant administrator, previously held senior positions at the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group.
According to the source, Beck was the driving force behind revising a risk assessment of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.
EPA’s human health risk assessment of the chemical “was finalized in December 2024 before she came, and she specifically reopened it,” the source said.
Once the assessment was reopened, the Trump EPA proposed late last year nearly doubling what’s considered safe exposure levels of formaldehyde – a big win for the chemical industry. Beck’s name appears in the EPA’s notice seeking public input.
The agency has yet to issue final regulations.
Beck did not respond to CNN’s email asking her directly about the formaldehyde issue.
“Nancy Beck is in the weeds. She reads every word. Looks at every science research. And so there is absolutely political pressure, because she’s in there looking at everything,” the employee who recently left the agency’s chemical division added.
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