How our bedrock chemical safety law, the Lautenberg Act, protects us

November 25, 2025

President Obama signed the Lautenberg Act to fix America’s badly outdated chemical safety law on June 22, 2016.

For decades, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 had proven ineffective at ensuring the safety of the chemicals used in a broad range of products, such as household cleaners, clothing and couches. It also failed to protect our air, water and land from unsafe chemicals that industrial facilities released into the environment.

The Lautenberg Act finally gave the EPA the tools necessary to ensure the safety of chemicals and significantly strengthen health protections for American families, but that progress may now be rolled back.

Congress is considering rewriting the law to gut critical health protections. Hearings began the third day of the Trump administration to reopen the law and pave the way for more toxic chemicals in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the products we use.

Notable improvements in the law

Prior to the 2016 TSCA reform, the broken chemical safety system:

• Allowed tens of thousands of chemicals to remain on the market without any safety review.
• Let chemical companies put hundreds of new chemicals on the market every year without demonstrating that they were safe.
• Required the government to have evidence a chemical posed a risk before it could require testing — which made no logical sense.
• Left the government virtually powerless to regulate even chemicals known to be dangerous.
• Gave companies wide latitude to claim chemical information they submitted to the government should be considered trade secrets and hidden from the public, and even from state and local governments and medical professionals.

Significant reforms mean that the law now:

• Mandates safety reviews for high-priority chemicals that are actively on the market.
• Requires a safety finding for new chemicals before they can enter the market.
• Replaces TSCA’s burdensome cost-benefit safety standard — which prevented the EPA from banning asbestos — with a purely health-based safety standard.
• Requires protection of vulnerable populations like children, pregnant women, and those who work or live near the chemical plants that use and release these chemicals.
• Gives the EPA enhanced authority to require testing of both new and existing chemicals.
• Sets aggressive, judicially enforceable deadlines for EPA decisions.
• Makes more information about chemicals available by limiting companies’ ability to claim information as confidential, and by giving states — and health and environmental professionals — access to confidential information they need to do their jobs.

See which facilities near you are being assessed or regulated under TSCA

The long road to reform TSCA

For more than a decade, EDF’s experts called for stronger protections, issuing a series of groundbreaking reports and papers, and using EDF’s chemicals blog to provide our perspective on current issues and developments on chemicals policy reform.

Major advances in chemicals policies in other parts of the world and in U.S. states over the past few decades left the U.S. behind in the increasingly global chemicals economy.

This updated law has been bringing U.S. chemicals policy into the 21st century — with bans on some of the most toxic chemicals like trichloroethylene, methylene chloride and asbestos, and with reviews of all new chemicals before they enter the market. That progress is now at risk.