EPA Guidance Portal – 2-29-20

The EPA Guidance Portal that I discussed briefly yesterday is now up. The web site provided yesterday by the EPA is actually just a landing site for Guidance Document pages for each of the following EPA offices:

• Office of Air and Radiation (OAR)

• Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP)

• Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA)

• Office of General Counsel (OGC)

• Office of International and Tribal Affairs (OITA)

• Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM)

• Office of Mission Support (OMS)

• Office of Research and Development (ORD)

• Office of Water (OW)

• All EPA Regional offices

Each page uses a common format with a little descriptive blurb and then a table of guidance documents. There is an interesting little disclaimer in that descriptive blurb: “The agency may not cite, use, or rely on any guidance that is not posted on this website, except to establish historical facts.” That certainly means that keeping up with changes on these pages could be important.

There are some interesting apparent start-up glitches on some of these pages. The page for the Office of Air and Radiation, for instance, had some problems listing the ‘Original Issue Date’ information for their documents; all of them are in 2020 (“2020-12-05” for the first document; hmmm, and that link does not go anywhere). In another instance, on the page for Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, the first document listed is apparently a new guidance document issued yesterday: “Manufacturer Requests for Risk Evaluation, Information for Submitters”. Unfortunately the link just takes you to the “Assessing and Managing Chemicals under TSCA” page with no mention of the guidance document.

Hopefully the EPA will get the bugs worked out in their system fairly quickly.