The Scariest Trump Appointee You’ve Never Heard Of

The Trump administration just appointed a chemical industry bigwig to a high-level chemical safety position at the Environmental Protection Agency as Deputy Assistant Administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

You read that right. Nancy Beck is coming to the EPA straight from the American Chemistry Council, the powerful lobby whose members include Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, ExxonMobil Chemical, Chevron Phillips Chemical and Bayer among others. Now she’ll be making decisions as the Deputy Assistant Administrator of the EPA department whose stated mission is to “protect you, your family, and the environment from potential risks from pesticides and toxic chemicals.”

Here’s three things to know about Nancy Beck:

She has helped craft the chemical industry’s political agenda for years.

Before being appointed to her new position, Beck worked for the ACC as senior director for regulatory science policy in the Division of Regulatory and Technical Affairs. In that position, she helped draft the industry’s positions on chemical legislation before Congress and key regulations at the EPA and other agencies—including the major chemical reform bill that passed last year. Just last month, she testified before a House committee and advocated for EPA to adopt ACC’s scientific approach to evaluating chemical safety. 

In her new position at EPA she’ll oversee the agency’s decisions on chemical safety—decisions that will directly affect your health as well as the financial interests of ACC’s member companies. 

A House committee once called her out for “very disturbing” attempts to undermine EPA science.

Before joining the ACC, Beck was one of a handful of White House scientists who reviewed EPA regulations for the Office of Budget and Management —a job she started under the Bush Administration in 2002. During her tenure, that office increasingly scrutinized EPA chemical safety evaluations, resulting in significant delays.   

In 2009, a report by the House Science and Technology Committee called her out by name for her efforts to rewrite and at times undermine EPA’s assessments of toxic chemicals. Specifically, the report found a Beck comment on a proposed EPA evaluation of a group of flame retardants to be “very disturbing because it represents a substantive editorial change regarding how to characterize the science.” It went on to say that her proposed changes “appear to enhance uncertainty” and that “the whole point of the exercise was to delay.”

In other words, she used her position in the executive branch to water down EPA’s conclusions about chemical safety and unduly delay finalization of risk assessments. Now she’ll be overseeing how those conclusions get drafted at the agency. 

She’s been a vocal critic of EPA’s chemical safety findings, despite her own “fundamentally flawed” approach to chemical safety.   

Beck has been described as a “powerful critic” of EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS program, which researches chemical toxicity. IRIS assessments have traditionally played a big role in informing the rules that EPA and state governments adopt to protect people from toxic chemicals. Beck has frequently criticized the program and its conclusions, especially when they suggest the need to reduce pollution.

When Beck was a scientist in the George W. Bush administration's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, she helped write a controversial draft guidance that would have revamped and undermined the way EPA and other agencies evaluate chemical safety. That guidance was eventually withdrawn and significantly scaled back after the National Academy of Sciences criticized her proposed approach as “fundamentally flawed.”

In her new post, Beck will be free to ignore IRIS findings and direct her office to make chemical safety decisions based on her preferred kinds of studies and scientific methods. She could also play a role in eliminating the IRIS chemical toxicity assessments altogether—something proposed by the Trump administration in a leaked memo

This post was updated Tuesday, May 2.

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