EPA eliminating ORD as Congress looks to defund another critical EPA program

On July 18, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the elimination of the Office of Research and Development (ORD), which, according to ORD’s website at time of publication, “conducts the research for EPA that provides the foundation for credible decision-making to safeguard human health and ecosystems from environmental pollutants.”

One of ORD’s flagship programs, the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), is supposed to provide that technical backbone to assess the toxicity of over 500 highly relevant chemicals in commerce. Over the last decade, however, the credibility and validity of IRIS chemical toxicity assessments continued to be questioned, especially because the agency is allowed to use uncertainty and adjustment factors in their assessments.

For example, and as illustrated in NAPANOW, in one of the agency’s last IRIS assessments, released on Jan. 13, EPA identified that certain PFAS forever chemistries were the second-most toxic chemical ever known to humankind – 100,000 more ‘toxic’ than the chemical warfare agents phosgene or hydrogen cyanide. While such toxicity seems highly unlikely from both a practical perspective and as illustrated thorough non-agency external reviews and published research, EPA’s overly conservative approach and adjustments tend to over-estimate actual chemical toxicity. Notwithstanding accuracy, such toxicity assessments have dramatic impacts on setting and updating environmental standards and criteria, impacting wide swaths of industry including asphalt mix production.

For example, IRIS and other ORD assessments were instrumental in setting current drinking water standards for PFAS chemistries at levels so low, they are difficult to even reliably measure.

All impact the cost of doing business.

While the future of ORD’s programs remain uncertain, because the agency’s IRIS toxicological assessments have and continue to be relied upon to set environmental standards, it will be difficult to strike existing EPA chemical assessments. However, Congress is now trying to address the latter, most recently (July 22) introducing statutory language prohibiting funding for EPA’s IRIS program, as part of the FY26 Interior & Environment Appropriations bill. NAPA strongly supports revamping EPA’s IRIS program consistent with our support of this statutory language (see our coalition letters to EPA and Congress).

Additionally, any existing promulgated environmental chemical standard, even if based on questionable, disputed, or even invalidated science, will be difficult to strike or roll-back, especially because EPA has a number of legal mechanisms, called ‘anti-backsliding provisions’, that prevent the relaxation of certain environmental standards once established. While eliminating/refocusing ORD and IRIS is one step in the current Trump Administration’s effort on deregulation, level-setting prior environmental standards will continue to remain difficult.