The Environmental Protection Agency is facing a subpoena from House Science Committee Democrats as a tense back-and-forth over one of the agency’s chemical risk programs escalates.
Committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, issued the subpoenas Friday, according to the agency, following through on threats made last month. Johnson is seeking documents she says the EPA has been holding back related to Trump officials’ decision to reorganize its Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, program, which studies the risks chemicals pose to human health.
Johnson and other Democrats have also sought documents over the EPA’s decision to shut down the IRIS program’s assessment of formaldehyde, which international health institutions have said can cause cancer. The EPA has shifted its review of formaldehyde to the agency’s chemical safety office, to be conducted under the new toxic substances law, by which the EPA regulates new and existing chemicals. Congress passed a bipartisan overhaul of the law in 2016.
“I intend to find out why it was shut down and if this decision was made appropriately,” Johnson wrote EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler in a letter Friday accompanying the subpoenas. “If the EPA won’t cooperate with this legitimate Congressional oversight, then additional subpoenas will be forthcoming.”
The EPA insists that it has been transparent with House Science Committee Democrats and has offered a top political official, David Dunlap, for a briefing. Dunlap, one of the EPA’s leading science officials and a former Koch Industries official, is at the center of the controversy.
Dunlap ultimately recused himself from work on the formaldehyde study, given his prior work for Koch. But Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether Dunlap followed that pledge to a T, amid a report last month from Politico that he participated in discussions before signing his recusal statement.
Both Wheeler and Dunlap received subpoenas from the House Science Committee.
“As someone who’s been on the other side of this before, there is a process for doing and responding to congressional oversight, and we were engaged in that process, that back-and-forth iterative process,” an EPA senior official told the Washington Examiner. “We were negotiating with them in good faith, providing them with offers that were never responded to.”
“The committee has chosen, quite frankly, an unreasonable and unwarranted nuclear option that I can only surmise is a political investigation rather than a pursuit of the truth,” the official added.
In a letter to Johnson earlier this month, the EPA offered to set up a briefing with Dunlap and to allow committee staff to confidentially view a document Johnson is seeking that the agency has said is deliberative and doesn’t want released publicly. The document in question is a memo from the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection offering input on IRIS priorities.
Johnson, in her letter, said those EPA offers are “insufficient and eight months too late.” She also said that, though the EPA had provided thousands of pages of documents to the committee, much of the information has been “useless” or “heavily redacted to the point of worthlessness.”
However, Johnson did offer the EPA a little more time to get another set of documents to her before slapping the agency with another subpoena.
The chairwoman is asking for any documents produced by the EPA’s scientific integrity official produced in response to a March inquiry from her and several Democratic senators about whether EPA officials violated the agency’s scientific integrity policy by delaying, and ultimately shutting down, the IRIS program’s formaldehyde review.
The EPA, though, in a letter Thursday to the Chairwoman said the request for those documents had never been made before, and therefore it needed more time to determine how to respond.
Johnson has given the EPA until Nov. 22 to produce those documents.
