U.S. Environmental Protection Agency	20-P-0247
£	ro Office of Inspector General	August 17,2020
\mj
At a Glance
Why We Did This Project
The U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency's Office of
Inspector General conducted
this audit to determine whether
the EPA met the deadlines
already imposed by the Frank
R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety
for the 21 st Century Act in
2016, which amended the
Toxic Substances Control Act
of 1976, and has the staff,
resources, and management
controls in place to meet future
statutory deadlines.
The TSCA provided the EPA
with the authority to assess the
safety of commercial chemicals
and to regulate those
chemicals that posed an
"unreasonable risk" to human
health or the environment. Prior
to the 2016 amendments, the
EPA only used its authority
under the TSCA to limit or ban
the use of five existing
chemicals in 40 years. The
amendments strengthened the
EPA's authorities to evaluate
and regulate both existing and
new chemicals.
This report addresses the
following:
•	Ensuring the safety of
chemicals.
This project addresses a top
EPA management challenge:
•	Improving workforce/workload
analyses.
Address inquiries to our public
affairs office at (202) 566-2391 or
OIG WEBCOMMENTS@epa.gov.
Lack of Planning Risks EPA's Abiiity to Meet
Toxic Substances Control Act Deadlines
The EPA did not complete a
significant TSCA deadline on
June 19, 2020, and the Agency
is at risk of missing future
deadlines due to a lack of staff
and resource planning.
What We Found
The 2016 TSCA amendments required the
EPA to develop new rules for chemical
prioritization for risk evaluation and risk
evaluation for existing chemicals.
Additionally, the amended law requires the
EPA to review all new chemical submissions
and make a regulatory determination. The
EPA met several of its TSCA deadlines but did not complete all ten required
existing chemical risk evaluations by the June 19, 2020 deadline. Because of
statutory requirements, the number of required existing chemical risk evaluations
doubled at the end of 2019, risking the EPA's ability to meet TSCA deadlines.
The EPA's ability to assess its TSCA workload—and subsequently estimate the
workforce levels necessary to achieve that workload—is critically important. The
Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics has not publicly identified the additional
staff and resources it needs to accomplish all mandated TSCA requirements. The
OPPT's resource planning is hindered by not complying with the U.S. Office of
Personnel Management regulations, which requires developing a workforce plan
to manage current and future workforce needs.
The EPA's program offices have not conducted a systematic workload analysis
or identified workforce needs for budget justification purposes since 1987. We
found this to be true for the OPPT, which is responsible for implementing the
TSCA amendments. Though the OPPT expects to hire more staff members to
implement the TSCA amendments in fiscal year 2020, the Office lacks a
workforce-and-workload analysis to successfully implement and meet the 2016
TSCA deadlines. Additionally, the EPA's annual plans for risk evaluations were
neither done in a timely manner nor met the statutory requirements to identify the
resources needed to initiate or complete the risk evaluations for the year.
Recommendations and Planned Agency Corrective Actions
We recommend that the assistant administrator for Chemical Safety and Pollution
Prevention (1) publish the annual existing chemical plan including the anticipated
implementation efforts and required resources, (2) conduct a workforce analysis
to assess the OPPT's capability to implement the TSCA, and (3) specify what
skill gaps must be filled in fiscal year 2021 to meet the TSCA requirements.
The Agency provided acceptable corrective actions and estimated milestone
dates for all recommendations. We consider these recommendations resolved
with corrective actions pending.
List of OIG reports.

-------