Documents Reveal Plan to Fight PFAS Regulations With Industry-Backed Research

An industry-friendly research group has set forth plans to bolster legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency's PFAS regulations for drinking water by conducting what experts say is biased research, The Guardianreported Tuesday.

Documents obtained by the newspaper show that the Ohio-based research group Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA), led by controversial toxicologist Michael Dourson, aims to publish peer-reviewed papers by the end of 2024 that can help industry legal challenges to drinking water rules that the EPA finalized in April.

Dourson, some of whose research funding comes from industry groups, sent a fundraising email in July laying out his plans. "Can we count on your group to make a tax-deductible donation to get our team to publish a set of papers by the end of 2024?" he asked.

TERA organized a conference in October at which a pro-industry plan for challenging the EPA's PFAS regulations was laid out—to attack the statistical methods used by the agency and emphasize scientific uncertainty—a conference document obtained by The Guardian shows.

Current and former EPA experts who viewed the email and the conference document sharply criticized Dourson's approach to research on PFAS, which are a set of roughly 16,000 synthetic compounds linked to cancer and a wide range of other serious health conditions.

Maria Doa, a former EPA risk assessment manager who's now a director at the Environmental Defense Fund, told The Guardian that TERA's plans were "not a valid approach to science."

"They're trying to undermine the EPA's science, make it sound like there's uncertainty where there isn't, and make it sound like there's disagreement within the scientific community where there's not," she said.

Experts compared the effort to undermine PFAS regulations with industry-funded science to similar efforts used by the tobacco industry in decades past.

"This is out of the playbook and it's a lot of the same quote-unquote scientists and same hired guns," Erik Olson, a director at the National Resources Defense Council, told The Guardian.

Penny Fenner-Crisp, a former EPA water division manager who worked with Dourson, told The Guardian that she was astounded by the straightforward bias on display in the documents.

"In my 22 years spent in three regulatory programs I came to understand the games [the industry] plays, but this one astonished me because it's unusual to be so blatant," she said.

The EPA regulations set a limit of 4 parts per trillion on two of the main types of PFAS, and up to 10 ppt for other types. Gourson, who previously worked for the EPA but has since shifted his approach and, as he puts it, learned to "honor industry's knowledge," has argued that the limits should be far higher. He and other scientists, some of whom have industry ties, published a study in December that supports a higher limit for a main type of PFAS.

The legal challenges to the EPA's water regulations come from water utilities and chemical manufacturers. At least one lawsuit was brought in part by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a lobby group that represents companies such as 3M and DuPont, which developed PFAS in the mid-20th century for use in consumer and industrial products, and reportedly hid knowledge of its toxic impacts and widespread distribution.

In the leaked email, Dourson said his forthcoming papers will be published in the first issue of a new journal that aims to "support" the legal challenges to PFAS regulations.

The stakes of the legal cases against the EPA's water rules are extremely high, and not just because of the direct impact they will have on hundreds of millions of Americans who may already have toxic PFAS in their drinking water. A victory for industry could also discourage further regulation of chemicals in drinking water.

"This is pivotal," Betsy Southerland, a former director of science and technology at the EPA's water division, told The Guardian, speaking about the legal defense of the PFAS rules established in April. "If a court strikes this down… then the EPA will say the bar is too high to ever regulate using the Safe Drinking Water Act."

Southerland toldThe Wall Street Journal in May that Dourson "produces biased science that cherry picks data."

Dourson was named to lead the EPA's chemical safety division in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump but withdrew himself from consideration for the position following criticism over his ties to industry. The New York Times at the time published emails Dourson had exchanged with the ACC that showed a close relationship.