"EPA plans to quickly revamp its guidelines for evaluating whether environmental contaminants can cause cancer or other ailments, a move Trump administration critics fear is part of a broader effort to weaken the basis for regulating a wide range of pollutants.
At issue is a fundamental responsibility of the agency: How to determine whether potentially harmful substances pose an unacceptable risk to human health and the environment.
The outcomes of such risk reviews can then be used by EPA's regulatory offices and other agencies to, for example, limit the types of pesticides that farmers can apply to their crops or the amount of hazardous air pollutants oil and gas refineries can emit.
EPA sources say the Trump administration is now seeking to revise the standards for that highly scientific process in a matter of months. That timeline, experts fear, makes it impossible to do a thorough job and could take years to fix — leaving millions of Americans at greater risk from unhealthy levels of pollution in the meantime."
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