US EPA needs funding boost to meet new TSCA requirements

The Environmental Protection Agency continues to suffer from long-term congressional underfunding, which has starved it of the resources needed to meet its existing and future needs. The agency needs more resources to equip it to handle these all-important challenges.

By the start of the Biden administration, the EPA’s workforce and budget had declined to levels not seen since the 1980s. Yet when Congress provided the new administration with its first annual EPA appropriation, it rejected 85 percent of its requests for new funding– $1.7 billionin all – to rebuild the agency’s depleted workforce and restore its core capacity to protect the environment, address climate change, and advance environmental justice. That effectively froze the EPA’s budget at the 2021 funding levels negotiated by the Trump administration, with a nominal 4 percent “increase,” less than half the inflation rate. 

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