With a potential gutting of EPA’s research office looming on the horizon, concerns are mounting that the agency’s air quality reviews that serve as the backbone for pollution control rules could be at risk.
Those legally required reviews rank among the agency’s most complex and far-reaching regulatory endeavors, with the potential to prompt new compliance measures on industries ranging from oil refineries to tissue manufacturers.
Since passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, successive tightenings of what are technically known as National Ambient Air Quality Standards have been credited with driving major pollution cuts and saving tens of thousands of lives.
Research office employees play a crucial role by crunching thousands of studies into bulky roundups of the state of scientific knowledge into an individual pollutant’s health or environmental effects.
