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

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

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 top executive at the American Chemistry Council – the main trade group for chemical manufacturers – where her job was to fight EPA regulations. Then Trump put her in charge of the EPA’s chemical safety office. Same office. Same regulations. Different jersey. She did this in 2017 too, and when she left, a subsequent internal EPA investigation found she had systematically undermined the agency’s scientific work. 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 to run the office that conducts those very assessments. Within months, the EPA reversed course and adopted exactly the approach she’d been paid to lobby for.

The amount of formaldehyde the EPA now considers 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 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 poses an unreasonable risk. Of the 55 scientists who worked on those assessments, eight still have 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’s been nominated 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. Those holds have now expired. Beck’s last one – covering her former employer, law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, whose clients include major chemical industry trade groups – lifted on January 19th. 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 Beck’s office do 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.

Watchdog groups say no conflict-of-interest enforcement actions have been taken against anyone in the entire Trump executive branch. Zero. The Office of Government Ethics has been handing out waivers, in the words of one ethics 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’ve sent thousands of public comments opposing Beck’s proposed rewrite of the chemical review framework, calling it proof that the EPA is captured by corporate interests. The MAHA Commission’s own 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. Their 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.

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