Toxic Substances

EPA's Chemical Testing Program Has Made Little Progress Gao ID: RCED-90-112 April 25, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO evaluated the Interagency Testing Committee's (ITC) and Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) implementation of the chemical testing program under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

GAO found that: (1) EPA and ITC had identified for testing less than 1 percent of the more than 60,000 chemicals in the TSCA inventory; (2) neither ITC nor EPA had produced a list of chemicals that did not require testing; (3) since the enactment of TSCA, EPA had completed test data for only six chemicals and had not finished assessing those; (4) ITC members' poor attendance may have contributed to its lack of crucial data it needed to make recommendations; (5) after proposing test rules, EPA continued to take an average of more than 2 years to make them final; and (6) the EPA and ITC testing program lacked overall objectives and a strategy for achieving them.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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