Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the most powerful Republican to push EPA for a drinking water limit for toxic “forever chemicals,” lambasted the Biden administration’s recently finalized regulation as unworkable and based on “the most extreme voices in the debate.”
EPA issued the first ever national limits for the PFAS in April that gave utilities five years to eradicate any detectable levels of two of the chemicals PFOA and PFOS that were used for decades in a wide range of products.
“The EPA had a real opportunity here in the PFAS space to set durable, science-based standards to remedy a real environmental concern,” she said Wednesday during a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing with EPA Administrator Michael Regan.
But she argued the new EPA rule “lacks robust scientific support and did not fully consider the financial strains for compliance, particularly for rural and historically disadvantaged communities.”
Why it matters: Capito, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee whose home state of West Virginia has suffered from massive PFAS contamination, has been crucial in advancing and defending the drinking water regulation over the past three presidential administrations.
Her pressure was particularly key to convincing the Trump EPA to launch the regulatory process under the Safe Drinking Water Act after POLITICO reported in 2019 that the agency was poised to issue a plan for dealing with PFAS that did not include doing so.
Now, her criticism of the regulation that resulted from that process comes as water utilities, the chemicals industry and manufacturing groups are raising alarm about the strict new standard from the Biden administration.
Too stringent: Capito argued that the new EPA standard is far more stringent than the limits set by other countries and said she would have been "strongly supportive" of standards closer to those advised by the Obama administration in non-regulatory health advisory in 2016. Those levels were 17.5 times higher than the new standards' 4 part per trillion limit for the chemicals PFOA and PFOS.
In setting the new drinking water standards, EPA scientists concluded that more recent research demonstrated harms at far lower levels.
Capito also criticized the Biden administration’s decision to designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances under the nation’s Superfund law, arguing that the costs of the new drinking water standard “will only be worsened” by that move.
Water utilities, airports, farmers and other entities that handled the chemicals unwittingly worry that they will get pulled into years of litigation because of the designation. Capito and other EPW Republicans are pushing for legislation to exempt so-called "passive receivers" from liability under the law. Environmental groups oppose such a move and the Biden EPA issued an enforcement discretion policy saying it generally "does not intend to pursue" such entities.