House Republicans have targeted two of U.S. EPA's programs for assessing the human health and environmental effects of chemicals in their fiscal 2013 appropriations bill.

The legislation, which will continue to be marked up today, calls for deep cuts to EPA's budget. It would slash EPA's funding by 17 percent to $7 billion, which is less than the agency received in fiscal 1998.

On chemicals, the bill would require the agency to provide a progress report on its endocrine disruptor program -- which studies chemical effects on the human hormonal system -- and implement changes to its Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS.

IRIS, which conducts health assessments that become the building blocks of regulations, has become a frequent target for Republicans at hearings and in spending packages.

The committee report says "it has become increasingly clear that fundamental improvements in the policies and practices of the IRIS program are necessary to ensure that the assessments developed are firmly based on up-to-date scientific knowledge, meet the highest of standards of scientific inquiry, and are evaluated in accordance with acceptable scientific approaches."

Consequently, the legislation instructs EPA to issue a progress report on changes the agency has made to IRIS in order to implement recommendations from a National Academy of Sciences review of IRIS's formaldehyde assessment. The April 2011 NAS review found several problems with EPA's methodologies and devoted a chapter to ways of fixing the problems (Greenwire, April 8, 2011).

The bill gives EPA a March 1, 2013, deadline for the report.

Notably, Congress passed a similar provision in its $1 trillion omnibus spending package last December. EPA has said repeatedly that it agrees with all of the NAS recommendations and is in the process of implementing them. It released a progress report in May that said it is using a phased approach to putting the new processes in place. Republicans were not satisfied with the report, however, or EPA's pace in making the changes (E&E Daily, May 8).

The fiscal 2013 appropriations bill would also require EPA to re-evaluate the methods IRIS has previously used, including its weight-of-evidence approach. The agency would be instructed to use the IRIS assessment of acrylonitrile -- a polymer ingredient -- for this reassessment and include a chapter about it in the progress report about "whether there are scientifically more appropriate methods" to reach conclusions on health effects.

Appropriators also want EPA to include "documentation" for all future draft and final assessments on how the agency incorporated the NAS recommendations.

Democrats on the Appropriations Committee highlighted the IRIS provisions as particularly egregious attacks from Republicans, calling them "burdensome" in a statement.

On endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the appropriations bill would require EPA to submit another report on its "current and future efforts to develop approaches" for addressing that class of substances.