‘FAKE NEWS’: EPA Sets the Record Straight as Former Staff Say Changes Put ‘People at Risk’
Daily Signal cites CEI Director of the center for energy and environment Daren Bakst regarding IRIS.
“The IRIS program has rightfully drawn criticism over the years because of its unreasonable chemical risk assessments,” Daren Bakst, director of the center for energy and environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Signal. “Too often, the IRIS program focused only on hazard, which is a potential for harm, but not risk, which accounts for both the severity of harm and the likelihood of exposure.”
“For example, lions are undoubtedly hazardous animals. But when confined behind the bars of a zoo enclosure, the risk to visitors is vanishingly small,” he explained. “In practice, this means the IRIS program has raised regulatory alarms without quantifying human exposure levels or evaluating the health and environmental harms of the alternatives that would be used.”
A March 2025 report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted that “IRIS’s 2010 draft assessment value for formaldehyde was set lower than the amount humans naturally exhale with each breath.” Despite criticism from the National Association of Scholars, the program formalized the formaldehyde value in 2024, “highlighting how a myopic focus on hazards, absent any context related to real-world exposure data, can result in an absurdly low health value.”
The National Funeral Directors Association emphasized the negative impact of such a stringent formaldehyde rule.
