Yesterday the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) announced that it had approved a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) from the EPA on “Accidental Release Prevention Requirements: Risk Management Programs Under the Clean Air Act; Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention ”. This rulemaking was submitted to OIRA on September 29th, 2025.
According to the listing for this rulemaking in the Spring 2025 Unified Agenda:
“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is initiating a new rulemaking to reconsider the current Risk Management Program (RMP) rule requirements. The agency is providing notice of this proposed rulemaking, which will align with agency priorities to ensure clean air, land, and water for every American; restore American energy dominance; and promote cooperative federalism and cross-agency partnership while reducing regulatory burden on facilities.”
Interestingly, the Spring 2025 Unified Agenda suggests that this NPRM would be published in August 2025, and the Final Rule would be published in January 2026. Since the Spring 2025 Unified Agenda was not published until September 2025, that schedule was patently wrong. While this Administration has been fighting self-inflicted personnel issues, particularly in the EPA, and has been pursuing an aggressive regulatory agenda (deregulation still requires regulatory actions), these agenda delays also reflect on the inertia of the federal government; it is hard to get something this large moving in a new direction. As a cautionary note, it takes just as long to stop undesired actions.
NOTE: OIRA approved this NPRM ‘consistent with change'. It
is never clear in these announcement how extensive those changes are, so it is
difficult to predict how soon EPA will get the revised NPRM to the Federal Register
for publication; next week, maybe….
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