WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) – House Democrats on Wednesday will begin their latest push to pass previously rejected measures regarding certain chemicals when they discuss a piece of legislation that mirrors one that failed last year.
The Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change is scheduled to mark up this latest “PFAS Action Act,” meaning it will hear and possibly adopt amendments and likely advance the bill to the Committee on Energy & Commerce.
Subcommittee member Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, introduced the bill in April. It contains the same provisions of a previous iteration of the bill that passed the House but never the formerly Republican-controlled Senate.
Subcommittee ranking Republican John Shimkus was a critic of the previous PFAS Action Act.
“We recognize the increased community anxiety that occurs due to the discovery of PFAS contamination, and we understand that some states may face disproportionate burdens without more federal action,” he wrote in a dissenting view of the bill.
“Unfortunately, (the PFAS Action Act) as amended mandates multiple, aggressive actions based on a woefully incomplete scientific understanding of health effects for this diverse class of up to 5,000 chemicals.”
PFAS was used in firefighting foam and consumer products like non-stick cookware and waterproof clothing. They have been dubbed "forever chemicals" because they don’t leave the human body once they make it in.
Research provided by a PFOA settlement earlier this century drew links to six diseases like kidney and testicular cancer, but many consider those results far from a complete study, considering the only individuals who were studied lived in the surrounding area of a DuPont plant in West Virginia.
Epidemiologist Kyle Steenland, of Emory University’s School of Public Health, wrote in an article funded by the Centers for Disease Control that evidence linking PFAS and cancer “remains sparse.”
The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump refused to set a formal toxicity level, and Steenland’s article agreed that doing so would be premature – given the lack of research.
Noting the inconsistencies of cancer rates, as well as what chemical (there are thousands in the PFAS family) was the subject of the exposures, his and Andrea Winquist’s article called the results of the various studies “informative, but not entirely conclusive.”
Democrats have accepted the results of the contested C8 study and used them to try to push PFAS measures through in the past. Notably at stake in the new PFAS Action Act is whether the chemicals will be designated as “hazardous” under the federal Superfund law, which would open many businesses to liability for cleanup of sites like landfills and public water systems.
House Democrats approved that measure in a spending bill but in 2020 their colleagues in the Senate were told to give up because it had no Republican support.
Wednesday’s markup is scheduled to occur before any hearings on the new bill, in comparison to hearings on previous PFAS bills that were dominated by activists and scientists ready to condemn the chemicals.
Some plaintiffs lawyers have a financial interest in the bill passing. They’ve already scored contingency fee contracts from several states that passed their own PFAS regulations that are much stronger than the EPA’s current advisory of 70 parts per trillion.
Some of those lawyers have contributed to the officials who hired them.
Lawsuits are stacking up in a federal multidistrict litigation in South Carolina against companies like 3M and DuPont, while one class action is pending in Ohio that seeks to include every person exposed to PFAS (nearly every American), despite not alleging any adverse health effects.
As for the new federal PFAS Action Act, it would require the EPA to establish formal regulations within two years, designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous air pollutants and place discharge limits on industrial releases, among other things.