The Environmental Protection Agency is pushing back after former officials claimed that retiring a controversial risk analysis program will put Americans at risk for toxic exposure.
The Integrated Risk Information System, which the EPA created without a mandate from Congress in 1985, has reportedly exaggerated the risk of certain chemicals, leading to negative real-world consequences. Under Administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency is sunsetting the program, but will keep all its previous reports public, while adding a disclaimer that the system’s assessments may not be fit for purpose. The EPA has also directed offices to reevaluate the reliability of the system’s reports.
Former EPA staff with the climate activist group Environmental Protection Network have criticized the move, saying that retiring the program will make “it easier to second-guess the science between toxic chemical protections.”
“As we told ProPublica, it is 100% false to suggest that EPA’s memo puts ‘people at risk’ or allows anyone to ‘ignore a regulation, permit or enforcement action’—anyone who simply ignores a binding legal requirement is violating the law,” EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.
She rejected the idea that the sunsetting of the program would give industry more control and increase health risks.
“That is the Left’s favorite fake news accusation to throw at EPA, and it’s lazy nonsense,” Hirsch said.
2 Examples of EPA IRIS Failures
Hirsch noted that the IRIS program developed overly conservative and arguably alarmist assumptions regarding extremely small amounts of a potentially toxic chemical.
“The IRIS program has rightfully drawn criticism over the years because of its unreasonable chemical risk assessments,” Daren Bakst, director of the center for energy and environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Signal. “Too often, the IRIS program focused only on hazard, which is a potential for harm, but not risk, which accounts for both the severity of harm and the likelihood of exposure.”
“For example, lions are undoubtedly hazardous animals. But when confined behind the bars of a zoo enclosure, the risk to visitors is vanishingly small,” he explained. “In practice, this means the IRIS program has raised regulatory alarms without quantifying human exposure levels or evaluating the health and environmental harms of the alternatives that would be used.”
A March 2025 report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted that “IRIS’s 2010 draft assessment value for formaldehyde was set lower than the amount humans naturally exhale with each breath.” Despite criticism from the National Association of Scholars, the program formalized the formaldehyde value in 2024, “highlighting how a myopic focus on hazards, absent any context related to real-world exposure data, can result in an absurdly low health value.”
The National Funeral Directors Association emphasized the negative impact of such a stringent formaldehyde rule.
“Formaldehyde is a critical chemical used by funeral directors across America,” Lesley Witter, the association’s senior vice president of advocacy, told The Daily Signal. “Funeral directors are taught in mortuary school how to safely use formaldehyde. Our members have been concerned about access to this critical tool due to regulations based on a flawed IRIS value for formaldehyde.”
“We’re happy to see EPA moving away from relying on unrealistic IRIS assessments and relying on high-quality, gold standard science moving forward,” she added.
The agency’s program also reportedly established an extremely low risk value for the sterilizing agent ethylene oxide, at a level that is 19,000 times lower than naturally occurring levels in the human body. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, this stringent ruling contributed to the closure of sterilization plants and worsened the critical shortages of medical equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Chemical assessments should integrate real-world exposure data that consider naturally occurring levels of chemicals in the human body and environment,” Bakst said.
IRIS Defenders’ Response
“EPA should always use the best available science and update chemical risk assessments in transparent ways when the evidence supports doing so,” an Environmental Protection Network spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “But EPA has not explained how this new approach will be better, more consistent, or more independent.”
“Specific disagreements over formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, or any other chemical should be resolved through transparent, independent, peer-reviewed updates, not by replacing a consistent agencywide scientific assessment process with a fragmented system that risks different answers in different EPA offices,” the spokesperson added.
Yet Hirsch emphasized that the information will have more utility in separate EPA offices.
“Essentially, this information moving forward will be developed directly for the purpose of fulfilling EPA’s statutory responsibilities, allowing for more in-depth, specific, and timely analysis to be done on risks posed by pollutants—whereas when the IRIS program developed this information as ‘one-size-fits-all’, offices had challenges utilizing the narrow set of information in a way that was helpful for evaluating actual risk,” she told The Daily Signal.
If the EPA’s offices determine that regulatory changes make sense in light of reviewing the IRIS data, they will “follow all required steps to propose such a change.”
