EPA Clears Backlog of Chemical Risk Notifications, Ensuring Public Health Protections and Increasing Transparency
Released October 10, 2025
Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is announcing the elimination of an extensive backlog of notifications received from companies regarding chemical risks that needed review and routing across the agency. Thanks to process improvements implemented by the Trump Administration, EPA reviewed over 3,000 of these submissions and distributed over 900 of them across the agency. EPA is ensuring that there is access throughout EPA to the information the agency receives through Toxics Substances Control Act (TSCA) reporting requirements. This will improve decisions to protect human health and the environment throughout EPA regulatory programs.
Section 8(e) of the TSCA requires chemical manufacturers, importers, processers, and distributors to report to EPA any information that indicates their chemical may pose substantial risk to human health or the environment. Non-confidential submissions are automatically uploaded to EPA’s ChemView website for public availability. However, all submissions—including those with confidential business information—enter an internal database for EPA staff to review for data relevancy and internal routing. The backlog of these submissions continued to grow over the last four years.
To address this issue, EPA assembled a team to eliminate the backlog and address the challenges of adapting to modern demands. As of today, the team completed review and assessment of more than 3,000 TSCA 8(e) submissions. About 65 contacts across EPA now receive notifications of TSCA section 8(e) submissions on substances such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pesticides, chemicals with pre-manufacture notices (PMNs) or significant new use rules (SNURs), high production volume chemicals (HPVs) and many more. Of the approximately 3,000 backlogged TSCA section 8(e) submissions processed by the team, 920 were flagged as high interest and distributed across the agency.
The agency has taken the following steps to prevent future backlogs:
- Establishing a workgroup that leverages expertise of EPA staff across the agency to identify inefficiencies in the 8(e) program and develop process improvements,
- Enhancing the flagging process to categorize incoming TSCA section 8(e) submissions for faster and more effective distribution to EPA staff, aiding in filling data gaps and meeting regulatory deadlines, and
- Implementing a new automated notification system that sends weekly updates to EPA staff via email when incoming 8(e) submissions may be relevant to their work.
EPA is in the process of identifying further steps to make the TSCA section 8(e) process more streamlined for submitters and will continue to update stakeholders on this process.