Joint letter to Congress- Toxic Substance Control Act

December 16, 2025

A joint letter was sent to Congress urging that they reject the chemical lobby's push to gut chemical safety protections in the Toxic Substances Control Act.

NGO letter on TSCA 12_2025.pdf

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Senators Capito and Whitehouse, Representatives Guthrie and Pallone-

The undersigned organizations representing communities across the U.S. experiencing the health and environmental effects of exposure to dangerous chemicals urge you to stand with families and communities and reject any attempt to reopen the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the principal U.S. statute to assure the safety of chemicals.

We understand that the chemical lobby is pressuring members to reopen TSCA and weaken the protections it provides. Doing so would directly undermine public health protections and erase much of the progress our nation has made to shield people from dangerous chemicals. Dismantling TSCA’s health protections would be a historic step backward in protecting Americans from unsafe chemicals that contaminate our food, drinking water, consumer products, air and soil. Congress strengthened TSCA in 2016 with overwhelming bipartisan support.

After four decades of inaction, the amended law finally gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority and responsibility to regulate and ban substances long known to threaten the health of workers, consumers and families. Since 2016, EPA has acted on high-hazard substances like asbestos, methylene chloride and trichloroethylene that leading scientists have found cause cancer, birth defects, reproductive harm and other serious diseases for decades. Before the 2016 amendments, EPA allowed chemical companies to introduce hundreds of new chemicals, including Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), into commerce without the safeguards necessary to prevent widespread human exposure.

We have seen how the hundreds of PFAS that EPA greenlighted have polluted our drinking water, air, and soil, and continue to build up in our bodies and threaten the health of millions of people. It would be a tragic mistake to turn back the clock and restore a weak and ineffective chemical safety program that failed to prevent this public health catastrophe. There is more need than ever for strong protections from toxic chemicals.

The U.S. continues to see an alarming rise in chronic disease linked to chemical exposure and other environmental factors. While thousands of chemicals can be found in our workplaces, homes, schools and the environment, very few have been independently studied or assessed, or restricted to protect health or the environment. Vulnerable groups like infants, children, pregnant women, workers, the elderly and fenceline communities are both more susceptible to chemical hazards and woefully unprotected.

Beyond the EPA’s work, many states have taken the lead in protecting their residents from harmful chemicals—restricting PFAS, toxic flame retardants, harmful plasticizers, and heavy metals. These state-level efforts have already driven industry-wide changes and strengthened public health protections. Reopening TSCA would threaten these hard-won gains and jeopardize states’ ability to regulate on behalf of their citizens, especially given the chemical lobby’s push to preempt state local regulation. At a time when we must do more to protect our communities from chemical threats, we should not go backward. We urge that you stand strong against any weakening of TSCA and fight for an effective national program that delivers strong public health protections to all Americans.

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