Hybrid Coating Technologies Inc (fka HCTI)

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The following is one example of published reports of push back at EPA on the part of the American Chemical Council since the US new administration was put in place:

'The Trump administration appears poised to cement key rules that were heavily shaped by an expert who was a top official for the chemical industry's lobbying group.
By ANNIE SNIDER and ALEX GUILLÉN
| 06/22/2017 07:28 PM EDT
| Updated 06/22/2017

The Trump administration released the nation’s most important chemical-safety rules in decades Thursday — but only after making a series of business-friendly changes overseen by a former industry advocate who holds a top post at the EPA.

Career agency employees had raised objections to the changes steered by EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Nancy Beck, who until April was the senior director of regulatory science policy at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s leading lobbying group. Those include limits on how broadly the agency would review thousands of potentially hazardous substances, EPA staffers wrote in an internal memo reviewed by POLITICO.

Such limits could cause the agency to fail to act on potential chemical uses "that present an unreasonable risk to health or the environment,” EPA's top chemicals enforcement official argued in the May 23 memo.

The rules are meant to implement last year’s landmark rewrite of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, a major bipartisan achievement in a deeply divided Congress. Both parties agreed that the law needed an update — the original version didn't even allow EPA to ban asbestos, a known carcinogen, and some states had begun to step in and create their own patchwork of regulations for chemicals.

But the Trump administration’s steps to implement the law, and Beck’s role in particular, are drawing alarm from environmental groups and congressional Democrats.

Melanie Benesh of the Environmental Working Group called Beck the "scariest Trump appointee you've never heard of," and pointed to a 2009 Democratic congressional report that accused Beck of working to delay and undermine EPA's chemical studies during her previous tenure at the OMB.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, argued in a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on Wednesday that Beck's appointment "has the potential to undermine the scientific integrity of EPA's TSCA implementation and the consumer confidence we sought to build with a reformed TSCA." Pallone is seeking information about Beck's involvement with the chemicals rules and the issues she is ethically allowed to work on.

Beck told POLITICO that she has been "very involved" with the rulemaking for the past two months at EPA. She also defended the changes in the rules.

“The development of a rule when you go from proposal to final, or even as you develop a rule, it just evolves over time,” she said in an interview Wednesday, before the rules came out. “So I think that this has been a moving target, and will continue to be a moving target until it gets through the OMB review process.”

A statement from EPA's senior ethics counsel said Beck did not need to recuse herself from working on the TSCA rules because they are "matters of general applicability." The counsel added that Beck was cleared to consider comments her former employer had submitted.

The American Chemistry Council spent more than $9 million on lobbying last year, and its employees and PAC donated $541,000 to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle, giving Republicans 2½ times as much as it gave Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

EPA officials told POLITICO that the issues raised in the memo from the agency's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance were part of a typical intra-agency consultation process.

Jeff Morris, director of EPA's Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics — the division charged with writing the rules implementing TSCA — said chemical safety officials met with the enforcement office "and talked through their comments, and based on that discussion, we moved forward with the rule. At the end of the day, OECA concurred on our approach."

That doesn't mean the final rules necessarily incorporated OECA's suggestions, he added, but in the end it produced a rule "that we could all support."

Thursday marked the anniversary of the 2016 revamp of the 40-year-old TSCA, which regulates the tens of thousands of chemicals used in the United States. It took Congress two years to hash out the compromise, ultimately winning support from chemical makers and some environmental groups for legislation that beefed up EPA's power to regulate harmful chemicals. '

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/22/trump-epa-energy-chemicals-clash-239875