Conolly downplayed the influence on his findings, noting that he had worked for the military and academia.
“In evaluating science, what matters is the quality of the science,” Conolly said. “Saying that science is no good because it was industry-funded is a cop-out.”
Conflicts of interest questions
The same industry leaders carrying out the attack on the regulations in 2022-2024 took over the EPA in 2025, documents show. They quickly went to work dismantling the formaldehyde regulations.
Among them are Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, former top American Chemistry Council officials now in leadership at the EPA chemical safety office. Dekleva also spent 32 years at DuPont.
“The [formaldehyde] regulatory changes are happening at Beck and Dekleva’s direction, with their direct oversight and supervision, and with their approval of the final language,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA scientist now with the Public Employees for Responsibility non-profit. It works with whistleblowers and EPA employees to expose agency wrongdoing.
The industry attacks focused on two key pieces of science underpinning the strong formaldehyde regulations.
The EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (Iris) is the office that determined that no level of exposure to formaldehyde is safe. Until the second Trump administration, Iris was among the most politically insulated offices in the EPA, Bennett said. It aims to do “pure science” that is not influenced by the political winds, Bennett added.
Iris’s conclusions are reviewed by the National Academy of Science Engineering and Medicine (Nasem). Abraham Lincoln established Nasem to provide independent scientific guidance to federal agencies and to review their work. It is also politically insulated and composed of many of the nation’s foremost independent scientists, academics and industry players.
A Nasem committee wrote in 2024 that it “concurred” with Iris’s conclusion that no level of formaldehyde exposure was safe, finding it “appropriate and acceptable”. The EPA’s findings were “consistent with EPA’s state-of-practice methods”.
Documents show many examples of the industry taking aim at Nasem’s and Iris’s findings. At the February 2023 meeting, the American Chemistry Council argued that there was robust scientific agreement that Iris’s assessment contained “deficiencies”.
This directly contradicted what Nasem wrote, Doa said. And she found significant conflicts of interest in 11 of the 15 scientists industry cited in its presentation. Among them is Harvey Checkoway, who receives research funding from the American Chemistry Council, Aluminum Company of America, Dupont, Materion and Monsanto, among other industry clients.
Checkoway did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
In other cases, the industry again “cherrypicked” data, Doa said, noting a 2022 Dekleva letter to the EPA, while Dekleva was still at the American Chemistry Council. It claimed Iris “implied” that .3 ppm was a safe level of exposure, which Doa said overtly contradicts Iris’s findings.
Dekleva repeatedly cites in the letter Conolly’s 15-year-old science that the agency had since found was out of date or too uncertain. In its justification for undoing the rules that were published on the Federal Register, the Trump EPA wrote that it “revisited” the Iris assessment and is “no longer relying on the EPA IRIS”.
The distortion of Nasem’s conclusion also appeared in the Federal Register and the EPA’s December 2025 announcement. It wrote that it had reviewed Nasem and other scientific bodies’ comments, and was “following their recommendations and focusing on the science”.
Olson is calling on Congress to investigate these types of issues and the broader industry takeover of the EPA.
“It sounds like insider baseball, but it has very real implications for people exposed to these chemicals and for people’s pocketbooks,” Olson said. “We’re going to pay for this through the nose for our taxes and insurance bills.”
