Government scientists are feeling pressure from political appointees to play down the safety risks for chemicals found in everyday consumer products, according to a new report.
Multiple current and former career employees at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention told CNN that supervisors pushed them to minimize the potential risk of chemicals that are being used in products already on shelves, and some veteran researchers said they’ve been pressured to make up absurd test scenarios to ensure the desired results
“What we’ve been told is: ‘Let’s look at alternative scenarios,’” one employee said. For example, if dunking two hands into a chemical shows risk, that person said a supervisor might ask, “What if you dip one hand? What if you dip one finger?”
“We are considering scenarios we don’t have any basis for,” the employee added.
That kind of backwards reasoning has become a defining feature of how the agency now approaches chemical safety reviews under the Trump administration, the sources said, and they reported that scientists have been told to stop considering the harm a chemical may have on specific racial groups.
“They don’t even let you finish,” one EPA staffer said. “It’s like you’ve got to brief immediately on the risk that you found.”
The pattern, as described by sources who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, is consistent and deliberate. The moment preliminary findings suggest a chemical poses a health risk, supervisors convene rapid internal meetings — sometimes before the analysis is even complete — where scientists are pressed to explain their findings to political appointees and find ways to revise them.
“It’s more like, ‘How can we fix this? What can we do to make the risk go away?’” the EPA staffer added.
The EPA, in a statement, defended its approach, saying it is implementing what it calls “gold standard science” and using “realistic exposure scenarios rather than defaulting to compounded worst-case assumptions.” But career scientists dispute that framing, arguing that the scenarios they are now being pushed toward have no grounding in how people actually encounter these chemicals in daily life.
The chemicals under review include substances already on store shelves in products ranging from household cleaners to cosmetics and deodorants. Some have been banned outright in the European Union, while thousands more await review in the years ahead.
A February training session obtained by the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility captured the shift in unusually plain terms, telling staff that risk assessment is “a narrative” — language that one career employee said amounted to “explicit instruction to make your chemical pass.”
“I’ve never seen us try to work backward to a preordained outcome,” the employee said. “If anything, that’s what they’re doing now. They want the outcome to be that the chemical is safe.”
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