Toxic Substances

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) progress in implementing the Toxic Substances Control Act's (TSCA) requirement that it monitor the chemical industry's testing of potentially harmful chemicals, focusing on: (1) actions EPA took after receiving test data; (2) EPA management controls over test data; and (3) EPA dissemination of chemical test results.

GAO found that: (1) since enactment of TSCA in 1976, EPA has received health and environmental test results for only 22 chemicals and has assessed the results for 13 of those chemicals; (2) although EPA concluded that three of those chemicals were dangerous, it did not take regulatory action because it believed that the chemicals did not pose significant or unreasonable risk; (3) EPA had no established criteria or methodology for determining when chemicals presented a significant or unreasonable risk; (4) there were numerous unnecessary delays in EPA assessments of chemical test results, with EPA averaging 7.7 years from recommending testing of a specific chemical to completing its evaluation of test results; (5) lack of management control and attention and failure to resolve testing problems in a timely manner caused many of the delays; (6) EPA reported its limited chemical testing as a material weakness and instituted several actions to encourage voluntary testing, international cooperation, and more efficient coordination with the chemical industry; and (7) TSCA test results were not readily accessible to researchers, other regulatory agencies, or the interested public, and the EPA method for making test results available was not always effective.

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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