Trump Administration Moves to Shutter Federal Chemical Safety Watchdog

Capital Beat

Washington, DC (WorkersCompensation.com) – As several chemical incidents have left workers across the country injured, the latest budget from the Trump administration proposes to cut funding for the federal agency that investigates those disasters and determines their causes.

The latest Trump administration budget would cut the funding for the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the small federal agency that probes chemical disasters and advocates for preventative measures to prevent further incidents.

But worker advocates and former Chemical Safety Board members warn dismantling the agency could impact states and workers more vulnerable to future disasters.

Since last year, the Chemical Safety Board has faced budget cuts that could eliminate the agency altogether. Board members have opposed the cuts, and moves to roll back new chemical disaster rules introduced under President Joe Biden and aimed at preventing accidents at thousands of industrial facilities across the country.

The board’s two remaining members – chairman Steve Owens, and board member Sylvia E. Johnson – warned in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency that the administration’s moves were taking “a significant step backwards” in preventing catastrophic chemical incidents.” The letter urged the agency not to eliminate mandatory audits at plants with prior accidents or measures encouraging the use of safer chemical alternatives. Additionally, the letter urged the administration to preserve requirements for sites to adopt new safeguards to prepare for storms, floods and other climate-related risks, and to stick with a “stop work” provision that allows workers to stop work when they feel unsafe.

Rick Engler, a former member of the CSB, said the letter was a brave attempt.

“It’s very much a David and Goliath situation,” Engler told the New York Times. “The E.P.A. clearly needs oversight, because it’s taking steps that will do nothing but endanger worker and public safety.”

The Trump 2027 budget proposal requested the Chemical Safety Board receive no funding. His 2026 budget also requested no funding for the budget. The administration argues the CSB’s work duplicates work done by the EPA and OSHA.

Brigit Hirsch, the E.P.A. press secretary, said that the agency welcomed the board’s input.

“America has seen decades of progress in reducing and preventing chemical accidents, progress made without the excessive regulatory burdens imposed” by the Biden-era rule, she said.

The move comes as the country has seen a number of chemical incidents.

This past month, a body shop employee in Maryland Heights, Mo., was injured in a fire that officials think was started by cleaning chemicals. And in Longview, Wash., eleven workers at a paper mill were killed and several more were injured when a tank holding 600,000 gallons of a caustic chemical compound called white liquor exploded. And in Garden Grove, California, mass evacuations were ordered and a state of emergency was declared when a tank containing nearly 7,000 gallons of highly toxic methyl methacrylate became unstable at an aerospace plastics facility causing it to heat and risk explosion. 

Advocates in West Virginia said their state would be vulnerable if the CSB is eliminated.

In April, a violent chemical reaction at a plant injured 19 people at a metal refining company outside of Charleston. Workers at the Ames Goldsmith Catalyst Refiners were dismantling a plant near Institute, West Virginia when nitric acid and another chemical combined created the hydrogen sulfide toxic gas. Seven of the injured were first responders, officials said.

Since 2008, there have been eight chemical incidents in West Virginia. Others include a toxic release at DuPont’s Belle plant in 2010 that killed a worker, and a spill at Freedom Industries in 2014 that tainted the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people in the state.

Maya Nye, federal policy director for the environmental health organization Coming Clean, said that prior to the Ames Goldsmith incident, a 2008 explosion at the Bayer Crop Science plant in Institute, West Virginia, was the deadliest chemical incident in her memory.

In that incident, a chemical explosion killed two workers and sent a fireball into the air that forced the evacuation of thousands of residents from their homes for hours. The CSB found several lapses, including the stockpiling of methyl isocyanate, the chemical that killed thousands in a 1984 chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.

Nye said incidents like the ones in West Virginia could have been avoided.

“These can be prevented,” Nye told the Mountain State Spotlight. “Every incident that occurs is 100 percent preventable.”

In the Ames Goldsmith incident, federal investigators arrived quickly and began to piece together what went wrong. Now, that agency is threatened with elimination, and Nye said, impact will be most felt by people. Those in low-income communities and communities of color often face greater risks when it comes to chemical incidents, she said.

But those who stand to lose the most, she said, are employees.

“Workers are typically hurt first and worst,” she said.

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