WASHINGTON, D.C. – A Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) liaison shadowed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new chemicals program for a week, said Shari Barash, the agency’s director of new chemicals within the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.
Speaking with reporters at the American Chemistry Council’s (ACC) GlobalChem conference last week, Barash said the program, which is responsible for reviewing new chemicals under the Toxic Substances Control Act, had not received notification of any personnel cuts from the DOGE team as of April 15.
She also added that she doesn't think the new chemicals division will face severe cuts, given the administration's focus on reducing the review backlog.
“I feel like the new chemicals program is hopefully well-positioned to maintain our resources,” she said. “I haven't been informed at this point, so we're all hopeful.”
ACC has frequently criticized EPA’s new chemicals review process, saying the agency consistently misses its mandated 90-day deadlines to conduct the assessments.
When asked about overall morale within her department, Barash told Chemical Processing that “probably anywhere in the federal government right now, workers are nervous.”
High-Tech Help
However, the new chemicals division is receiving some help in the form of $17 million Congressional appropriation to modernize its IT systems, said Barash during her presentation at GlobalChem.
She also pointed out that the new chemicals program recently experienced a 12-day outage during which the division could not receive submissions or communicate through the Central Data Exchange, EPA’s electronic reporting site. However, smaller, ongoing delays often cause greater issues for the new chemicals program, including lost days for rulings.
“It’s an understatement to say we can’t wait for new systems to be in place,” Barash said, adding that in terms of risk-assessment progress, the agency has reduced its 2023 and older backlog by 70%. The agency completed 501 risk assessments in 2024 and had completed 258 through March 31 this year, putting it on track to exceed that total in 2025.
To speed reviews of low-volume exemptions, or LVEs, the new chemicals division has created an “LVE express” team with the goal of conducting 80 LVEs over two months, which will get the agency substantially caught up on those cases, Barash noted. The new chemicals group is receiving help from the Office of Research and Development’s computational toxicology group to complete the LVE reviews.
Barash also provided an update on the agency's Cheminformatics analysis modules. The platform being developed by the Center for Computational Toxicology and Exposure will allow users, including EPA and external stakeholders, to search and compare a variety of chemical and hazard information.
“It will integrate information across many curated data systems and will revolutionize our approach to identifying analogs and finding the information associated with them,” Barash said.
This will help the new chemicals program minimize rework, increase speed and improve quality because submitters will have access to the same types of data and information that reviewers have, Barash said.
