Free Republic

President Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee chemical safety at the Environmental Protection Agency has for years accepted payments for criticizing studies that raised concerns about the safety of his clients’ products, according to a review of financial records and his published work by The Associated Press. Michael L. Dourson’s nomination as head of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention was to be considered by a Senate committee Wednesday, but was postponed when the Senate adjourned early for the week. If confirmed, ethics experts said, Dourson’s past writings and the money paid to him and a nonprofit he founded...

The EPA's process for assessing chemical risk has come under fire for being inadequateThe US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) process for assessing the risk of human exposure to various chemicals is deeply flawed and actually threatens public health, according to two experts with inside experience. In fact, they are urging the agency to ‘fundamentally alter’ its approach to chemical risk evaluation.In a Nature commentary, George Gray, who directs George Washington University’s Center for Risk Science and Public Health, and Joshua Cohen, deputy director of Tufts Medical Center’s Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health, note that many...