House Releases Discussion Draft of Legislation to Modernize TSCA

On January 15, 2026, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment announced it will hold a legislative hearing on January 22, 2026, entitled “Chemicals in Commerce: Legislative Proposal to Modernize America’s Chemical Safety Law, Strengthen Critical Supply Chains, and Grow Domestic Manufacturing.” The hearing will focus on a draft bill titled Discussion Draft of Legislation to Modernize the Toxic Substances Control Act (Discussion Draft).  While additional details for the hearing are not yet available at this time, the release of the Discussion Draft marks a notable milestone in Congress’s increasingly vocal promises to address perceived shortcomings in both the landmark 2016 amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) nearly ten years of implementation that followed. This is the first time that many of the contemplated legislative changes have been shared publicly. 

The Discussion Draft would impose sweeping changes to many of the key sections in TSCA, including those pertaining to definitions, testing authorities, review of new chemicals, review and management of existing chemicals, TSCA Inventory nomenclature, relationship to other federal laws, citizens’ petitions, TSCA fees, and more. Although The Acta Group (Acta^®) will continue to review carefully this text and its potential implications, we are pleased to share the following highlights and initial observations.

Definitions

• Changes to the statutory phrase “conditions of use” that limit EPA’s discretion to identify reasonably foreseen circumstances to those “more likely than not to be” and, in turn, narrow the scope of risk evaluations.

New Chemical Reviews

• A narrowed scope of new chemical reviews, limiting the assessment to just the conditions of use “identified by the submitter of the notice” — rather than the current requirement that EPA consider known, intended, and reasonably foreseen circumstances;

• A qualifier on how EPA can determine a new chemical may present an unreasonable risk, in that it must be “more likely than not that such unreasonable risk will occur”;

• A nondelegable requirement for the EPA Administrator personally to issue a statement for each premanufacture notice (PMN) review that EPA fails to review timely;

• A new requirement that EPA make “best efforts” to prioritize review of certain new chemical notices, including those that a submitter identifies as offering specified risk reduction benefits, eligible for Safer Choice program inclusion, or are necessary to “improve the security and resiliency of … domestic critical material supply chains” as identified by the Secretary of Commerce;

• Limitations on voluntary suspensions of the new chemical review period;  

• Changes making EPA’s requirement to address identified risk through Section 5(e) orders now discretionary instead of mandatory; and

• New authority for EPA to exempt new chemicals from the review process upon a showing that the activity has been approved by another Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member country.

Existing Chemical Risk Evaluations

• New emphasis on the likelihood of exposures/hazards, directing EPA to consider only those that “are more likely than not” to result in unreasonable risk;

• Explicit direction to consider the impact of existing federal regulatory limits, and not to assume noncompliance — including noncompliance with U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards; 

• Change to make all final risk evaluations “final agency action” and thus immediately judicially reviewable, rather than the current requirement that limits judicial review of an unreasonable risk determination until after the promulgation of a final TSCA Section 6 risk management rule;

• New compensation process and provisions to address the TSCA fee issue of reliant parties that do not fairly contribute to the risk evaluation fee for the particular chemical;

• Extension of TSCA fee authority for another ten years from date bill is signed into law, that  would allow EPA to continue to collect fees for risk evaluation activities; and

• Further direction to prioritize actual information on the chemical versus analog or modeled data. 

Existing Chemical Risk Management

• Change to the risk management standard, from requiring EPA to eliminate the identified unreasonable risk to a requirement that EPA “minimize, to the extent reasonably feasible” such risk; and 

• Amendments to TSCA Section 9 that prohibit EPA from issuing risk management rules that are “inconsistent” with other existing federal requirements.

TSCA Inventory Nomenclature

• New requirements for EPA to consider the equivalency of certain Unknown or Variable Composition, Complex reaction products or Biological materials (UVCB) chemical substances, such that they would not be considered new chemical substances and not subject to PMN and review requirements in TSCA Section 5. 

Citizens’ Petitions

• Removal of authority for citizens to petition EPA for issuance of a TSCA Section 6(a) risk management rule — replaced with new authority for citizens to petition EPA to consider designating a chemical as a high-priority substance for risk evaluation. 

TSCA Fee Collection

• A ten-year reauthorization of EPA’s authority to collect fees to help defray the costs of its implementation efforts, currently set to expire at the end of Fiscal Year 2026.

Commentary

The Discussion Draft is a culmination of nearly a decade of pent-up frustration with EPA’s efforts to implement TSCA and its perceived failure to live up to the bipartisan expectations and over-brimming optimism of 2016. Nonetheless, the scope and extent of the proposed changes are surprising and begs the question of who exactly the target is of the desired “discussion.” Acta reported last year on cautious agreement by key Senate Democrats that TSCA could benefit from improvement around the edges. Some public health and environmental organizations, to the contrary, have taken the public position that legislative amendments are unnecessary. While many of the ideas outlined in the Discussion Draft are interesting and laudable, this 37-page rewrite of many of the major compromises in the 2016 TSCA amendments is not likely to gain much traction with those constituencies. In the meantime, the clock continues to tick on EPA’s TSCA fee collection authority, the expiration of which Acta believes could exacerbate the TSCA program’s ongoing resource and workload challenges. The forthcoming hearing should shed some light on initial reactions to the Discussion Draft and perhaps set the stage for another round of bipartisan debate leading to addressing the shortcomings of the 2016 amendments.