(Daily Signal)—The Environmental Protection Agency is pushing back after former officials claimed that retiring a controversial risk analysis program will put Americans at risk for toxic exposure.
The Integrated Risk Information System, which the EPA created without a mandate from Congress in 1985, has reportedly exaggerated the risk of certain chemicals, leading to negative real-world consequences. Under Administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency is sunsetting the program, but will keep all its previous reports public, while adding a disclaimer that the system’s assessments may not be fit for purpose. The EPA has also directed offices to reevaluate the reliability of the system’s reports.
Former EPA staff with the climate activist group Environmental Protection Network have criticized the move, saying that retiring the program will make “it easier to second-guess the science between toxic chemical protections.”
“As we told ProPublica, it is 100% false to suggest that EPA’s memo puts ‘people at risk’ or allows anyone to ‘ignore a regulation, permit or enforcement action’—anyone who simply ignores a binding legal requirement is violating the law,” EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.
She rejected the idea that the sunsetting of the program would give industry more control and increase health risks.
“That is the Left’s favorite fake news accusation to throw at EPA, and it’s lazy nonsense,” Hirsch said.
2 Examples of EPA IRIS Failures
Hirsch noted that the IRIS program developed overly conservative and arguably alarmist assumptions regarding extremely small amounts of a potentially toxic chemical.
“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.
“Formaldehyde is a critical chemical used by funeral directors across America,” Lesley Witter, the association’s senior vice president of advocacy, told The Daily Signal. “Funeral directors are taught in mortuary school how to safely use formaldehyde. Our members have been concerned about access to this critical tool due to regulations based on a flawed IRIS value for formaldehyde.”
“We’re happy to see EPA moving away from relying on unrealistic IRIS assessments and relying on high-quality, gold standard science moving forward,” she added.
The agency’s program also reportedly established an extremely low risk value for the sterilizing agent ethylene oxide, at a level that is 19,000 times lower than naturally occurring levels in the human body. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, this stringent ruling contributed to the closure of sterilization plants and worsened the critical shortages of medical equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Chemical assessments should integrate real-world exposure data that consider naturally occurring levels of chemicals in the human body and environment,” Bakst said.
IRIS Defenders’ Response
“EPA should always use the best available science and update chemical risk assessments in transparent ways when the evidence supports doing so,” an Environmental Protection Network spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “But EPA has not explained how this new approach will be better, more consistent, or more independent.”
“Specific disagreements over formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, or any other chemical should be resolved through transparent, independent, peer-reviewed updates, not by replacing a consistent agencywide scientific assessment process with a fragmented system that risks different answers in different EPA offices,” the spokesperson added.
Yet Hirsch emphasized that the information will have more utility in separate EPA offices.
“Essentially, this information moving forward will be developed directly for the purpose of fulfilling EPA’s statutory responsibilities, allowing for more in-depth, specific, and timely analysis to be done on risks posed by pollutants—whereas when the IRIS program developed this information as ‘one-size-fits-all’, offices had challenges utilizing the narrow set of information in a way that was helpful for evaluating actual risk,” she told The Daily Signal.
If the EPA’s offices determine that regulatory changes make sense in light of reviewing the IRIS data, they will “follow all required steps to propose such a change.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
