Congressman Biggs' Opening Statement at Science, Space, and Technology Committee Markup
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Congressman Biggs delivered the following opening statement at this afternoon's Science, Space, and Technology Committee's Markup:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to speak on behalf of my bill, the Improving Science in Chemical Assessments Act.
This legislation ensures that chemical assessments conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency will advance the agency's core mission of protecting human health and the environment. Specifically, the bill will eliminate EPA's flawed Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, and return the responsibility of conducting hazard identification and dose response assessments to EPA's program offices, which are best situated to perform the work.
Without any foundation in law or direction from Congress, EPA administratively created the IRIS program in 1985 to "foster consistency" in chemical assessments conducted by EPA. Unfortunately, IRIS has evolved into a program plagued by inefficiencies and a lack of transparency, resulting in questionable science that can have a significant impact on the marketplace.
When IRIS assigns a toxicity value to a chemical, federal, state, and local regulatory authorities use it to make rules and regulations that can impact commerce. While in practice the program does not have any regulatory authority, the assessments produced by the program can still have a negative impact on the economy similar to the effect of regulation.
Over the past year, the Environment Subcommittee has conducted a hearing, hosted briefings with the EPA, met with stakeholders, and worked with our colleagues to learn more about the IRIS program. It has become very apparent that the program has lost its way.
My bill will address the problems of the program by ensuring that any future chemical assessments performed are tailored to the regulatory need of the relevant EPA program office. Let me be clear: chemical toxicity assessments will still be performed by the agency. They will just be performed by the program offices rather than IRIS. These future assessments will be stored in a publicly accessible Chemical Assessment Database, which will also retain the existing IRIS assessments.
Most importantly, this legislation promotes reliability in chemical hazard identification and dose response assessments by ensuring they will be carried out using the best available science and based on the weight of the scientific evidence. The bill requires that the EPA meet stringent scientific standards when assessing any given chemical by considering the relevance of the data, the uncertainty in the scientific information, the extent to which it has been peer reviewed, and whether the findings are reproducible.
Lastly, the bill creates a chemical hazard identification and dose response steering committee, chaired by the Office of Research and Development, to prevent duplication of work performed by the program offices. The steering committee will also be authorized to consider third-party assessments as a supplement to the work being performed by the program offices provided that the third-party assessments meet the scientific standards outlined in the bill.
The Chemical Assessment Improvement Act is a common-sense effort to re-focus EPA science back to its core mission. I want to thank Chairman Smith, Vice Chairman Lucas, Environment Subcommittee Vice Chairman Norman, and Representatives Rohrabacher, Posey, Weber, Babin, Higgins, Lesko, Hultgren, Abraham, Webster, Marshall, and Dunn for co-sponsoring this important legislation. I encourage the rest of my colleagues to support this bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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Congressman Andy Biggs is a first-term Representative from Arizona's Fifth Congressional District, representing parts of Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Queen Creek. Congressman Biggs is a member of the House Judiciary and Science, Space, and Technology committees, and is the chairman of the Environment Subcommittee. He lives with his wife, Cindy, in Gilbert.