In Short:
The Situation: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") announced it would reconsider the 2024 Risk Management Program ("RMP") rule.
The Result: EPA may revert to the same requirements from the first Trump administration's rule by rescinding the 2024 requirements for information availability and safer technologies and alternatives analyses, among others.
Looking Ahead: EPA will begin a new notice and comment rulemaking to clarify obligations under the RMP, likely before the compliance dates for the 2024 RMP rule.
Background
On March 12, 2025, EPA announced, among several pronouncements of deregulatory activity, its intent to reconsider the RMP rule enacted by the Biden administration (2024 Rule). Such an action would continue a tug-of-war over RMP requirements that has spanned multiple administrations.
In 2019, the Trump administration rescinded multiple amendments of the RMP rule (2019 Rule) enacted by the Obama administration in 2017 (2017 Rule). Those amendments included third-party audits, a safer technologies and alternatives analysis requirement, an incident investigation root cause analysis requirement, and requirements for providing facility chemical hazard information. In the 2024 Rule, the Biden administration reinstated these requirements, while also adding requirements for facility siting, employee participation, and community notification in cases of incidents.
Although EPA's present announcement does not specify intended changes, it alludes to rescinding the 2024 Rule in much the same way the 2019 Rule did with respect to the 2017 Rule. The announcement describes the 2024 Rule as making "America's oil and natural gas refineries and chemical facilities less safe and less competitive." It also touts the 2019 Rule as promoting "coordination between chemical facilities and emergency responders, cut[ting] red tape and regulatory burdens, and address[ing] security risks associated with prior amendments to the rule." National security, lack of necessity, and cost were all reasons the first Trump administration gave for rescinding the prior amendments.
National Security Concerns
In response to the 2017 rule, The Trump administration previously criticized increased information availability as creating national security concerns. The 2017 rule required facilities to provide chemical hazard information upon request to members of the public. The 2024 Rule sought to limit enhanced data availability to people who live, work, or spend significant time within six miles of the facility. However, this limitation does not fully address what the Trump administration described in 2019 as information that "could assist terrorists in selecting targets and/or increase the severity of an attack." In fact, Administrator Zeldin, in EPA's recent press release, states that the Biden administration "ignored recommendations from national security experts on how their rule makes chemical and other sensitive facilities in America more vulnerable to attack." Therefore, EPA is likely to once again propose eliminating provisions around the increased public availability of RMP data and to curtail, if not eliminate, the information on EPA's online Risk Management Public Data Tool.
Cost and Efficacy Concerns
In deciding to reconsider the 2024 Rule, EPA is also citing its desire to "cut red tape and regulatory burdens," which it believes it accomplished with the 2019 Rule. This suggests that EPA will once again pull back the requirements that this administration believes would increase costs on regulated entities without a clear benefit for facility or community safety. For example, the first Trump administration rejected post-accident third-party audit provisions because EPA has not had difficulty in procuring them through post-accident settlements.
Similarly, documented safer technologies and alternatives analysis provisions were rejected due to their high costs and a lack of evidence suggesting they reduced accident rates. In general, EPA is likely to reverse course on the 2024 Rule based on this familiar reasoning—increased costs for regulated entities, marginal benefits on design and operational metrics, and potential confusion caused by divergence from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Process Safety Management standards.
Timing
Compliance dates for the 2024 Rule are still two or more years away, and it appears EPA will endeavor to issue a new rule before then based on a recent filing that EPA made in a pair of cases before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals brought by industry groups to challenge EPA's denial of their petition for reconsideration of the 2024 Rule.
On March 6, 2025, EPA filed an unopposed motion to hold the cases in abeyance because it intended to begin a notice and comment rulemaking that "may obviate the need for judicial resolution of some or all of the disputed issues in this case," and that it hoped to finalize the new rule in "late 2026." The court ordered the cases to remain in abeyance on March 11, 2025, and instructed EPA to file status reports at 90-day intervals beginning June 9, 2025. EPA will also release its Semiannual Regulatory Agenda in the next few months, which should shed additional light on the expected timing for a proposed and final rule.
Three Key Takeaways
- As it did in 2019, EPA appears poised once again to walk back a previous administration's updates to the RMP rule.
- EPA will likely rely on the same rationale used for the 2019 Rule as a guide for how to structure a new proposed rule. Anticipated revisions include elimination of requirements that increase public availability of RMP data, raise costs for regulated entities, or diverge from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Process Safety Management standard.
- While the precise timing of a new rule is still uncertain, status updates in related litigation indicate that EPA is hoping to finalize a new RMP rule by late 2026.
