Political Quotes

“Mr. Chair, I just want to clarify for those in the Chamber who may not be aware, IRIS is an information-collecting entity, not a regulator. If IRIS were eliminated, EPA would still maintain an office of research and development, which would perform chemical assessments in coordination with a specialized program office within the Agency. What will compromise public safety is a poorly run government office spreading misinformation. I also want to point out that both the nonpartisan NAS and GAO have repeatedly criticized IRIS over the past 10 years. Even the few NAS and GAO recognitions of improvements to IRIS over the years have been strongly tempered by caveats that far more work needs to be done. For instance, the 2018 NAS report, which has been cited, suggests that IRIS still has not produced a basic handbook to guide its operations, even though that recommendation was made more than 4 years ago. This agency has been in existence since 1986 without a handbook, a basic handbook. Just to add a little bit more color to this debate, here is an example of how absurd IRIS risk assessments can be. It sets the risk value of the chemical ethylene oxide, which is often used to sterilize medical equipment, at 100 parts quadrillion. That is a 1 with 15 zeros behind it. That value is 19,000 times less than the naturally occurring level of ethylene oxide in the human body.…”