It could be as toxic as all get-out, and it still goes on the list as long as it meets the 45 percent effectiveness threshold.

To go back to what we do know about the dispersant that Chairman Boxer referred to, which has these characteristics of hazard to humans of liver damage, internal bleeding, and all those sorts of things, how does that transpire?

What are you doing to test for that, just so I understand?

Well, these two witnesses have been very helpful and very informative.

I applaud Senator Lautenberg's efforts in drafting a more reasoned alternative to the House bill.

However, it is unclear if this will limit the damage from the spill or cause even greater harm.

If a dispersant cannot meet minimum toxicity standards, then the dispersant should not be used on an oil spill.

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, it took 11 lives and triggered a chain of events that have led to what may be the largest and most destructive environmental disaster in our history.

We owe this to the communities along the Gulf Coast, but we also owe it to all Americans to assure them that we are prepared the next time such a disaster strikes.

I thank the witnesses for being here.

But there is no testing of any kind that is done about its toxicity or its health effects at that time by EPA?

That is why the National Contingency Plan explicitly states that having a product on the product schedule does not constitute approval by the EPA.

It may be appropriate to differentiate within that list, and it may be important to have somebody other than the manufacturer in a basically unreviewed disclosure of certain toxicity data come to a decision about the safety or not of the…

We could be the Saudi Arabia of clean energy technology.

But that shouldn't happen in the deep sea, the attachment to detritus.

And the reason we were told for that is because the damage to the cells is so immediate and so acute that you can't pick up endocrine disruption.

Particularly when you have what the Administrator referred to as a real emergency going on, the time at that point for the RRT process to go through a scientific evaluative process of determining what the toxicity consequences are off of…

So reforming that administrative process is something that is underway within EPA?