Trump administration considers rolling back chemical plant safeguards

The Trump administration will consider rolling back Biden-era regulations that increased safeguards for workers at chemical plants, it announced Thursday in a legal filing.

The Trump administration asked a court to pause legal challenges to the 2024 safety rules while it “undertakes a new rulemaking.”

It said that as part of this rulemaking it will “reassess elements of the underlying rule challenged here.”

It’s not entirely clear what exactly the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would rewrite — if anything. The agency declined to comment further.

However, the last Trump administration significantly weakened safety standards at chemical plants.

The standards in question apply to 12,000 industrial facilities, including chemical manufacturers and distributors, oil refineries, food and beverage manufacturers and agricultural supply distributors.

Rules were initially tightened under the Obama administration after a 2013 fertilizer plant explosion in Texas killed 15 people

When it rolled back the rule the first time, the Trump administration argued that there was “little data supporting the claimed benefits” of the safety regulation.

However, in restoring the protections and adding new ones, the Biden administration said that it was implementing the “strongest safety requirements ever for industrial facilities.”

And the latest news received pushback from environmental advocates, who argue that making changes could result in more chemical disasters.

“It would mean a real disservice to communities, first responders and workers,” said Adam Kron, an attorney with Earthjustice. “It would put them in greater harm’s way from these chemical disasters.”

Earthjustice is part of a coalition of environmental groups that tracks chemical disasters. This coalition has found that since January 2021, there have been more than 1,100 chemical incidents.

The news of a potential rewrite comes days after Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, in which he vowed to take on toxic chemicals, saying, “our goal is to get toxins out of our environment, poisons out of our food supply and keep our children healthy and strong.”

He has also repeatedly hammered the Biden administration for its response to a 2023 train derailment that released toxic substances into East Palestine, Ohio.

Yet that rhetoric also comes as Trump has pledged broad deregulatory action, which could clash with upholding chemical safeguards.

While the East Palestine disaster was related to a moving train rather than a chemical plant, Kron said there is “a hypocrisy in really acting concerned around the East Palestine disaster” while scaling back chemical safety rules.

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