Hold the Federal Government Accountable

 

For more than a decade, Defend Our Health Action and our partner Defend Our Health have been at the forefront of legislative efforts to achieve meaningful reform to the national chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

Finally, in 2016, President Barack Obama signed into law the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which obligates the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate and restrict a number of dangerous chemicals used in consumer products.

Since then, however, we’ve had to fight Trump Administration efforts to roll back the progress we made in 2016.

We’ve joined two lawsuits against the Trump EPA to hold the agency to the letter of the law and follow the chemical safety reform passed in 2016.

“The Trump EPA deliberately bypassed the law’s clear requirement that safety assessments be based on ALL uses of a chemical. By allowing some or even most chemical uses to be ignored, the EPA proposes to do the very thing the new law was intended to halt: allow the chemical industry to continue to produce and sell toxic chemicals that pose unacceptable risks to human health.”
—Mike Belliveau, board president of Defend Our Health Action

We’re fighting to defend public health on the federal level on multiple fronts.

Here are the other ways we’re pushing back against the Trump Administration:

• We’re watchdogging and submitting public comments against every federal attempt to rollback health protections.
• We’ve joined allied groups in officially petitioning the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate toxic chemicals like phthalates.
• We’re also organizing the grassroots to persuade Maine’s members of Congress to oppose Trump Administration appointments to key agency positions.