Two Separate Moves. One Pattern.

The EPA is making two distinct but connected decisions that affect how the federal government evaluates toxic chemicals. News coverage from both left and right is blurring them together, creating confusion about what is actually being proposed.

Move #1: Administrator Lee Zeldin is sunsetting the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) — an internal EPA database created in 1985 without a congressional mandate that agencies and regulators use to estimate chemical risks.

Move #2: The Trump administration is fighting in court to rescind a 2024 Biden-era rule that required a 90% collective cut in emissions of ethylene oxide (EtO) — a colorless gas used to sterilize roughly 20 billion medical devices annually.

These are different fights with different implications.

The IRIS Shutdown — Who's Right?

IRIS isn't a regulation. It's not a law. It's a risk assessment database the EPA built internally and that other agencies used as a reference tool.

EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch told The Daily Signal that retiring IRIS does NOT allow anyone to ignore a binding legal requirement. Any company that does violates the law. The existing IRIS reports stay public — they just get a disclaimer that they "may not be fit for purpose."

Daren Bakst, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, argues the program deserved criticism. His argument: IRIS assessed hazard — whether something could cause harm — without properly weighing risk, meaning actual exposure levels. A lion is hazardous. A lion behind zoo bars is low-risk. IRIS, he argues, frequently conflated the two.

Scientists have debated IRIS assumptions for years. It's a legitimate methodological critique.

What the EPA's critics from the Environmental Protection Network (a group of former EPA staff that leans activist) get right: sunsetting IRIS makes it easier for industry and regulators to dispute risk assessments that were built up over decades. Less institutional consensus means more legal grey area.

What they get wrong: framing the shutdown as killing a regulation. It wasn't one.

The Ethylene Oxide Fight — This One Has Real Stakes

The EtO case is harder to dismiss.

According to The Guardian, recent research has found ethylene oxide is approximately 60 times more carcinogenic than scientists believed when the last major regulations were set in 2006. The Biden EPA, using that updated science, passed a 2024 rule requiring collective EtO emitters to slash emissions by roughly 90%.

The Trump administration is now fighting in court to rescind that rule. A Harvard analysis cited by The Guardian details the administration's legal argument — that the EPA shouldn't be able to strengthen regulations simply because new science shows a chemical is more dangerous than previously thought.

The legal theory being advanced would make it structurally harder for the EPA to tighten chemical rules when science improves.

Erik Olson, senior adviser at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Guardian that if the Trump EPA wins, nearly 8 tons of the carcinogenic gas would continue being released annually — disproportionately in low-income neighborhoods.

The NRDC has its own agenda. But the tonnage figure and the legal argument are real, and they deserve scrutiny that neither side is giving them honestly.

What the Media Is Getting Wrong

NPR's Fresh Air ran a 44-minute interview with New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert framing the entire EPA shift as Zeldin "siding with polluters." Kolbert's framing is that science is being driven out and industry is taking over. Some of that is accurate — scientists HAVE been pushed out of the agency.

But Kolbert and NPR treat every EPA rollback as equivalent danger. They don't distinguish between a database shutdown with no regulatory force and a rule rescission that directly affects how much of a known carcinogen hangs in the air over neighborhoods.

The Daily Signal, meanwhile, leans hard on the IRIS methodological problems while barely engaging with the EtO rule rollback or the legal theory the administration is advancing in court. Calling critics "lazy nonsense" through EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch is not a rebuttal. It's deflection.

What This Means for Regular People

If you live near a medical device sterilization facility — which tend to cluster in lower-income and working-class communities — the EtO rule rollback matters. The science on that chemical got dramatically worse since 2006, the Biden rule addressed it, and the current administration is trying to undo that in court.

The IRIS shutdown has slower, structural consequences — it degrades the common scientific reference point that regulators, states, and courts have used for 40 years to assess chemical dangers.

Zeldin may be right that IRIS had methodology problems. Fix the methodology. Don't scrap the whole system and hand industry a blank check to relitigate every risk number from scratch.

That's regulatory capture wearing a budget hawk costume.