THE Trump administration plans to close the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (US CSB) this year, sparking fears its loss will erode industrial safety and cost lives.
The president’s budget for October onwards proposes cancelling funding for the CSB, a federal agency that investigates industrial chemical accidents, shares lessons learned, and issues recommendations to help improve industrial safety and avoid often-fatal accidents from being repeated.
Lawmakers and industry have questioned the logic of the decision, noting that the modest savings made by zeroing out the agency’s US$14m annual budget will be dwarfed by the costs resulting from just one industrial accident that the CSB could have helped prevent.
In a letter urging Trump to reverse the decision, 26 Democrat congressmembers wrote: “The CSB has long received strong bipartisan support for saving taxpayers, and communities, far more than the small cost of prevention. As many devastating chemical incidents amass hundreds of millions of dollars in property and economic damages, the prevention of one disaster would save multiples of the CSB’s total [budget]. With US chemical accidents happening nearly every two days, we cannot afford to lose the CSB.”
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