Amicus brief filed April 15, 2025

E&W Law Partner E. Donald Elliott is proud to have drafted a proposed pro bono (i.e. no charge) amicus brief to the D.C. Circuit with support by fellow E&W partners, Susan Bodine and Jeffrey Longsworth, as well as Yale Law Student, Aaron Szczesny. The brief was written on behalf of two scientific societies, Toxicology Excellence for Risk Analysis (TERA) and the International Society of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology (ISRTP), both headed by Michael Dourson PhD, an eminent toxicologist and risk assessor.

The brief argues that the Biden EPA’s incredibly low Maximum Contaminant Level of 4 parts per trillion (yes, with a T! = four grains of sand in an Olympic size swimming pool) in drinking water is not supported by the science; is out of step with the safe levels recognized by our trading partners around the world and is up to 100,000 times more strigent than some of them who are even more environmentally conscious than we are; plus it violated EPA’s own guidelines for doing risk assessments. It is written in simple, clear language for lay judges.

Although outside the scope of this brief, this overly-conservative regulation is estimated to cost the economy at least $1 trillion with negligible, if any, benefits to heath. As E. Donald Elliott has written elsewhere, the best environmental rule is not always the one with the lowest limit. That’s because the “cost” side of benefit-cost analysis is a rough measure of all the other things we might be doing with the wasted money. And in this case, the overwhelming majority of the alleged benefits from the rule in EPA’s own analysis come from so called “co-benefits” from controlling other chemicals in water, mostly those that result from treatment with chlorine, which many European countries stopped using years ago.

E. Donald Elliott published an article in February 2024, before the rule came out, criticizing it in more detail which is available by CLICKING HERE

To download a PDF of the amicus brief, CLICK HERE