The EPA’s Chemical Safety Office Is Run by the Chemical Industry’s Former Lobbyists

By Rachel Hurley March 10th, 2026 Updated October 24th, 2026

The wildest trick the chemical industry ever pulled was convincing the government to hire its own lobbyists to regulate it.

These are the true evil villains of our time.

Nancy Beck spent years as a senior director at the American Chemistry Council - the main trade group for chemical manufacturers - where her job was to fight EPA regulations. Then Trump made her the No. 2 at the EPA’s chemical safety office, and she ran the place for most of 2025. Same office. Same regulations. Different jersey. She did this in 2017 too. So naturally, she was brought back for round two.

She’s not alone. Lynn Dekleva, now her deputy, came straight from the American Chemistry Council, where as recently as 2022 she was personally lobbying EPA scientists to loosen how they measure the cancer risk from formaldehyde. The EPA dismissed the idea. The National Academies of Sciences independently reviewed the decision and agreed with the dismissal. Then Dekleva got hired as a top deputy in the office that conducts those very assessments. Within months, the EPA reversed course and proposed exactly the approach she’d been paid to lobby for.

The amount of formaldehyde the EPA now proposes to call safe to inhale is nearly double what it was before. The World Health Organization says the maximum safe indoor exposure is 0.08 parts per million. The EPA’s proposed new threshold is 0.3. That’s almost four times the WHO limit, for a chemical that the CDC, the NIH, the WHO, and the EPA’s own scientists all classify as a known human carcinogen - one that causes nasopharyngeal cancer and leukemia.

The EPA’s internal risk assessment program, IRIS, finalized a review in August 2024 reaffirming formaldehyde causes cancer, and a few months later the agency found it poses an unreasonable risk. Of the 55 scientists who worked on those assessments, eight are still in those jobs. The rest were reorganized out.

Also on the chemicals team: Kyle Kunkler, who joined EPA last June after lobbying for the American Soybean Association - including on dicamba, a pesticide he is now the lead on at the agency. And Douglas Troutman, who was most recently interim CEO of the American Cleaning Institute, which spends its days fighting chemical regulations. He was confirmed in December to lead the whole office.

Here’s where the already-bad story gets worse.

When political appointees come into government, they’re typically barred for one year from working on matters directly involving their former clients. It’s the thinnest possible guardrail - a one-year cooling-off period - but it’s something. Beck’s and Dekleva’s holds have now expired. Beck’s last one - covering her former employer, law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth - lifted on January 19th, after holds on almost three dozen of her ex-clients, like the American Petroleum Institute and chemical maker Olin, ran out last year. Dekleva’s hold with the American Chemistry Council expired January 16th. The handcuffs are officially off.

During the year those holds were technically in place, both Beck and Dekleva received special ethics waivers allowing them to work on specific chemicals anyway.

The waivers came from the EPA’s own ethics office, which concluded that their participation was in “the interest of the United States Government.” The EPA issued both women authorizations to work on the same chemical rules, often on the same day. One of those authorizations let Dekleva work on asbestos. Another on methylene chloride. Another on trichloroethylene. These are not obscure chemicals - they are substances the chemical industry has been fighting to keep unregulated for decades, and which were finally restricted under Biden.

A Public Citizen watchdog says no enforcement actions have been taken in any of the Trump administration’s many conflict-of-interest scandals. Zero. The EPA’s ethics office has been handing out waivers “like candy on Halloween,” in the words of one watchdog - freely enough to make the ethics holds largely symbolic in the first place. Now that even those symbols are gone, the last fig leaf has dropped.

The part that should probably break your brain is that this is all happening while the administration is loudly promoting the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

MAHA influencers have actually been upset about it - they urged followers to comment against Beck’s proposed rewrite of the chemical review framework, and they’ve called Kunkler’s work on dicamba proof that the EPA is still captured by corporate interests. The MAHA Commission’s first report rebuked industry influence in government science. And yet Beck’s office is still standing, still running, still signing the memos. The cognitive dissonance is so thick you could insulate a wall with it.

If you want to do something about this, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon just sent a formal letter to the EPA demanding answers about the ethics obligations for these officials - his office would be a useful place to direct your attention. Public comments on EPA chemical rules are also genuinely read and counted; the proposed Beck framework got over 3,000 comments, compared to 369 for the previous version. That’s not nothing. Environmental Defense Fund has a tracker and action alerts at edf.org. And if you work in construction, manufacturing, or any industry where formaldehyde exposure is an occupational reality - your union, if you have one, needs to know this rule change is coming.

The people who used to get paid to fight chemical regulations are now the ones writing them. Beck’s and Dekleva’s cooling-off periods just expired.

And the furniture in your living room is still off-gassing formaldehyde into air that just got officially re-classified as safer than it actually is.

Sources