GOVERNMENT
91st Congress limps out First lameduck session in 19 years acts on some issues before expiration, but leaves many more unresolved Although the just-concluded 91st Congress passed several major bills of importance to the chemical industry and chemists, it left much unfinished business for the 92nd Congress, which starts in 10 days. Job safety legislation and air pollution amendments survived the first lameduck session in 19 years and were enacted late last year. But the first major trade legislation since 1962 was killed during the same session. The trade legislation and debate over environmental matters, chemical and biological warfare, scientific manpower questions, and drug industry issues will also be on this year's agenda, however. Comprehensive federal job safety and health legislation passed late in the session after 16 months of spirited debate and vigorous lobbying by organized labor and management groups. The law signed by President Nixon represents victories for both sides. Organized labor got the standard-setting authority vested in the Labor Department; the new standards set by Labor will supplant the current Walsh-Healy standards. Small victory. Management won a small victory when Senate-House conferees compromised and set up a threeman Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. Labor Department inspectors will be permitted to enter plants to issue and post citations for violations, but employers can contest violations before the commission. Another compromise requires the Labor Department to obtain a court order before closing down any plant. An earlier draft of the bill had granted the authority solely to Labor. The new law also places certain requirements upon the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. HEW is to develop criteria describing safe exposure levels to toxic materials and harmful physical agents. Lists of toxic agents are to be published and H E W is to conduct and publish industrywide studies of the effects of chronic or low-level exposure to stress, industrial processes, and materials on the potential for illness, disease, or loss of functional capacity in aging adults. These and other requirements of H E W will be carried out by the new National Institute for Occupational 22 C&EN JAN. 11, 1971
Safety and Health authorized by the bill. Agreement was finally reached late last year on the clean air amendments of 1970. These amendments to the Air Quality Act of 1967 provide tight deadlines and stiff standards designed to curb air pollution from both moving and stationary sources. Detroit's auto makers are under the federal gun to cut emissions for the 1975 model year by 90% from 1970 levels. Power to regulate the composition of motor vehicle fuels and fuel additives—and to ban some additives—was given to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Two standards. For pollutants subject to criteria documents (currently sulfur oxides, particulates, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and photochemical oxidants), two types of national ambient air quality standards will be required. Primary standards will be set to protect public health, and secondary standards to protect public welfare. The legislation also requires that criteria for nitrogen oxides, fluorides, lead, polynuclear organic matter, and odors be issued within 13 months. New source performance standards will also be set. These emission standards are expected to cover such CPI operations as nitric, sulfuric, and phosphoric acid manufacture, petrochemical plants, soap and detergent manufacture, and copper, lead, and zinc smelting operations. Hazardous pollutants such as beryllium, asbestos, mercury, and cadmium will also be subject to emission standards. The amendments also enable citizens to sue polluters who violate emission limitations, and to sue EPA if it does not carry out its mandatory functions under the amendments. Limited mandatory licensing of antipollution patents is also provided for. This licensing includes technology used to meet auto emission standards, emission standards for hazardous air pollutants, or new source standards of performance, if the technology is covered by a U.S. patent. If rights under such a patent are not reasonably available or if the technology is not commercially available through purchase of control equipment, the
Attorney General may certify to a district court that a lessening of competition will result and seek a license on reasonable terms and conditions. The 91st Congress didn't manage to enact any trade legislation and many Congressional observers don't think that the first session of the 92nd will either. The major impetus for trade legislation in the new Congress as well as in the old one arises from textile imports, mainly from Japan. Talks with the Japanese aimed at voluntary limitation of imports have been going on for months, but have moved only slightly off dead center. So, the Administration (along with various House and Senate members) is set to reintroduce trade legislation shortly after the new Congress gets under way. Rep. Wilbur Mills (D.Ark.), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee— which wrote a trade bill last year that had quotas on textiles and shoes, and called for repeal of the "American Selling Price" (ASP) concept—indicates that he will give the negotiators until March to get an agreement before he renews committee efforts on trade legislation. Sen. Russell Long (D.La.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, indicates Senate action will follow hard on the heels of House action. If Congress isn't prodded into action on trade legislation by the White House or by the lack of a textile agreement, then the venerable ASP system of customs valuation appears safe for at least another year. It may be just as well that the chemical industry will not have to defend ASP this year, for the industry's defense has been severely weakened. Last year, the House voted to repeal ASP after some ASP supporters broke ranks during Ways and Means Committee deliberations on the trade bill. According to industry sources, certain ASP boosters faced a hard economic decision that pitted their manmade fiber interests against a smaller benzenoid chemical business. Quotas for man-made fibers won; ASP lost. The Senate did not pass the bill, however. The forthcoming session promises a wide range of activity on environ-
mental matters. The Administration plans to send Congress an extensive legislative package—possibly by early February. Besides dealing with air, water, and solid waste pollution, the package may include provisions designed to regulate ocean dumping and curb spills of hazardous chemicals, measures to deal with toxic metals, and new proposals on taxes, land use, pesticides, and probably on pretesting of chemicals before they are marketed. The forthcoming Senate hearings on phosphates in detergents will likely also cover pretesting of chemicals. An Administration proposal to levy a $4.25-per-pound tax on lead used in gasoline additives fell by the wayside last year when the House Ways and Means Committee decided not to report the bill to the House, contending
pendent EPA and, within the Commerce Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). EPA, headed by former Justice Department assistant attorney general William D. Ruckelshaus, is primarily an enforcement agency, and centralizes the federal effort against air, water, and solid waste pollution. NOAA, whose largest component is the former Environmental Science Services Administration, is headed by former ESSA head Robert M. White. Public and Congressional furor over chemical and biological warfare (CBW) weapons should abate this year, but only temporarily. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will probably get around to holding hearings on ratification of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical and biological weapons—46 years after the protocol
that the committee does not know enough about the issue. The Administration plans to repackage the tax in this Congress—heralding it as an antipollution measure rather than as a revenue measure. Enactment of the Resource Recovery Act of 1970 switched the emphasis for federal effort away from conventional solid waste disposal toward re-use and recycling of resources. The act also provides an authorized level of spending of $463 million over three years, but appropriations aren't likely to reach this high level. In other environmental action, Congress went along with Administration plans last year to establish the inde-
was proposed and signed by the U.S. in Geneva. President Nixon resubmitted the protocol to the Senate late last August for ratification. A sharp debate is certain to develop over exclusion of both chemical defoliants and chemical riot control agents. Attempts to get some CBW facilities transferred to Health, Education, and Welfare for health-related research failed in Congress last year. But Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D.-Me.) and Sen. Charles Mathias (R.-Md.) have already renewed the Congressional effort this year. The Army, meanwhile, is set to dispose of offensive biological and toxin weapons and, as soon as this is finished
(probably by year's end), plans to dispose of die facilities used for research and preparation of these materials. The Pentagon is also paring funding of the CBW research effort. Pentagon planners are asking for $12.0 million in the fiscal 1972 budget for defensive biological research, compared to $15.4 million in 1971. For chemical weapons research, the Pentagon is asking for $28.9 million in fiscal 1972, compared to $29.2 million this fiscal year. Scientific manpower. Congress is expected to look more deeply into the scientific manpower situation this year. Reintroduction of bills in the Senate and House to provide relief for scientists and engineers hit by cutbacks in space and defense spending is expected. Also, hearings are slated before the House Science and Astronautics Committee on the production and use of scientists and engineers, with particular emphasis on the unemployment situation. The committee is also expected to take a look at how the support of science and technology relates to international trade, including the balance of payments. Bills creating an Office of Technology Assessment are also likely. In fiscal 1970 nearly $9 million in defense-supported research was affected by the Mansfield amendment, which prohibited the Defense Department from supporting research not directly related to a military function or operation. When the amendment was again offered to a military procurement authorization in fiscal 1971, a compromise was worked out in which a qualifying phrase was added. Under the qualifying phrase, DOD research was similarly limited, unless the Secretary of Defense determined that a project had a potential relationship to a military function or operation. Senate-House conferees on the appropriation bill, however, later abandoned the entire amendment. Drug issues. For the drug industry in 1971, the major Congressional issues center on the expected legislative battle over a federal health care program and national health insurance. Renewed attempts to set up a consumer protection agency and provide for consumer class action suits will also draw the attention of the industry (and of others). Other issues likely to come under Congressional scrutiny include drug pricing and procurement, a national formulary, coding of drugs, the use of humans as experimental subjects, and medicinal additives in animal feeds. The Food and Drug Administration's performance is also likely to be investigated again by the House Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations. JAN. 11, 1971 C&EN
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