U.S. EPA Issues Latest Proposal to Amend the Risk Management Program: A Return to Regulatory Stability?

On February 13, 2026, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released proposed revisions to the Clean Air Act (CAA or Act) Risk Management Program (RMP) regulations designed to prevent or mitigate the impact of accidental chemical releases. The proposal would scale back the amendments promulgated by the Biden EPA in 2024 to reduce compliance burdens and align RMP requirements more closely with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) Process Safety Management (PSM) rule. Once published in the Federal Register, the comment period for the proposed rule will begin.

The proposal is the latest rulemaking in a decade-long debate between Democratic and Republican administrations over whether the RMP rule needs to be amended to promote process safety at refineries, chemical plants, and other commercial and industrial facilities. Beginning in 2014, the Obama EPA sought to amend the RMP rule, culminating in a midnight regulation issued in January 2017. That amendment significantly revised the RMP regulations, adding new requirements for technological analyses, emergency response and preparedness, and public disclosure of information (2017 Rule). Key provisions, however, were paused, and many never took effect. In 2019, the Trump 45 administration issued a new rule (2019 Rule) that rescinded or modified many of the meaures in the 2017 Rule. Five years later, the Biden EPA restored and expanded on many provisions from the 2017 Rule (2024 Rule). This latest round of proposed revisions, which EPA characterizes as a “common sense approach” to chemical accident prevention, would modify many key provisions of the 2024 Rule. Each new rulemaking has been the subject of significant litigation from industry, state governments, and environmental nongovernmental organizations, most of which remains pending but dormant in court. The final rule issued after this latest proposal is expected to be no different.

The proposal would change 14 substantive areas of the RMP regulations. Notably, the compliance deadline has not yet been reached for many requirements imposed by the 2024 Rule, including some of the provisions that the proposed rule would change. Among key changes:

• Safer Technology and Alternatives Analysis (STAA) and Inherently Safer Technology and Design (IST/ISD): The 2024 Rule imposes a broad requirement on facilities with certain North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes — primarily associated with petroleum refineries, chemical plants, and coal product manufacturing facilities — to conduct STAAs to evaluate potential possibilities to eliminate or reduce hazards from a process, substitute less-hazardous substances, or otherwise modify a hazard to reduce risks associated with accidental releases. Some facilities are required to actively implement at least one such possibility. These requirements are currently set to become effective on May 10, 2027.
  
  More specifically, for example, the 2024 Rule requires all petroleum, coal product, and chemical manufacturing facilities and RMP Program Level 3 processes to conduct a STAA analysis at least once every five years as part of each process hazard analysis. The current proposal would limit the application of STAA to only “new” Program Level 3 processes at facilities regardless of NAICS code. “New” Program Level 3 processes would be defined as “any newly designed and built processes at existing or newly operating facilities.”
  
  The 2024 Rule further requires a subset of those facilities — such as petroleum refineries with hydrofluoric acid (HF) alkylation units — to evaluate, document the evaluation of, and implement at least one inherently safer process technology or designs, passive measure, or combination of active and procedural measures as part of each STAA. The proposal would also rescind the requirement that these facilities actually implement at least one of the corrective measures identified in the STAA analysis.

• Third-Party Compliance Audits: The 2024 Rule requires facilities to conduct third-party compliance audits following a single RMP-reportable accident. Reports from such third-party compliance audits must be submitted directly to the audit committee of the company’s board of directors (or equivalent), and written justifications if recommendations from those audit reports were not implemented at the site were required to be included in the facility’s next RMP submittal to EPA. The proposal provides two alternative potential revisions: (1) rescind all third-party audit requirements from the 2024 Rule or (2) require third-party audits only after two accidents and sunset the provision requiring such audits 10 years after it becomes effective while also completely rescinding the mandatory board-reporting requirements. The 2024 Rule’s audit provisions have a compliance deadline of May 10, 2027.

• Information Availability and RMP Public Data Tool: The proposal would rescind many of the most controversial information availability requirements in the 2024 Rule — which, in part, require facilities to provide certain chemical hazard information to any member of the public residing, working, or otherwise spending significant time within a six-mile radius from the facility fenceline — but nevertheless would retain some information availability requirements. Specifically, the proposed rule would require owners and/or operators to maintain some limited information, primarily related to substances used at the facility and emergency response preparedness, on an RMP Public Data Tool. The 2024 Rule’s information availability provisions have a compliance deadline of May 10, 2027.

• Recognized and Generally Accepted Good Engineering Practices (RAGAGEP) and Gap Analyses: The proposal would roll back requirements that took effect immediately following finalization of the 2024 Rule that require owners and/or operators of Program Level 3 processes to conduct analyses of their processes to determine gaps between prior and current RAGAGEP standards. The proposed rule, however, would retain the general requirement for facilities to ensure that their process safety information is kept “up to date.”

• Natural Hazards, Power Loss, and Facility Siting Hazard Analysis: The 2024 Rule requires facilities to explicitly include in their hazard analyses various evaluations of natural hazards, facility siting, and standby or backup power requirements for emissions monitoring equipment on site. These requirements immediately went into effect following finalization of the 2024 Rule. The proposal would rescind these specific requirements, as EPA reports that such evaluations were already encompassed within existing hazard analysis requirements.

• Backup or Standby Power: The 2024 Rule also requires owners and/or operators to maintain backup or standby power for systems that monitor covered processes. The proposed rule would eliminate this requirement entirely. The 2024 Rule’s backup power provisions have a compliance deadline of May 10, 2027.

• Employee Participation: The proposal would limit certain employee participation requirements introduced in the 2024 Rule in that it proposes to no longer require consultation with employees when addressing recommendations from process hazard analyses, compliance audits, and incident investigations. The proposal would also limit documentation requirements for “stop work” authority and would rescind requirements for owners/operators to develop and implement processes to allow employees to report unaddressed hazards and noncompliance at a facility directly to EPA, as the proposal states that such requirements are redundant and already covered by other reporting requirements. The 2024 Rule’s employee participation provisions have a compliance deadline of May 10, 2027.

• “Hot Work” Permits: The proposal would rescind the requirement to retain hot work permits for three years that was promulgated in the 2024 Rule and instead proposes to adopt the OSHA PSM standard, which requires owners and/or operators to retain permits only until completion of the hot work operation.¹

EPA reasons that these changes promote safety. Despite the decade-long attempt to amend the RMP regulations, many of the less hot-button regulations have been in place for years, and they continue to apply and remain in effect for thousands of covered industrial and commercial facilities. The agency points out that accident rates have continued to improve. And EPA has maintained a robust enforcement focus on RMP during Trump 47. All of these factors suggest that layering additional requirements on the RMP program would unduly complicate and burden process safety.

The timeline for finalizing the proposal into a rule is uncertain, but EPA is motivated to complete this rulemaking before the May 2027 compliance deadlines for the STAA and other provisions of the 2024 Rule noted above take effect² — or to take other administrative action to extend those deadlines. Once the proposal is finalized, as with all recent RMP rulemakings, it will likely be challenged in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Stakeholders should carefully evaluate how the proposed changes would affect their facilities and strongly consider engaging in the rulemaking process. Once the proposal is published in the Federal Register, interested parties will have 45 days to submit comments, and EPA plans to hold a virtual public hearing shortly after publication. Given the scope of the proposed rule and the likelihood of significant public engagement, the comment process presents a meaningful opportunity for regulated entities, industry groups, and other stakeholders to shape the final contours of the RMP regulations.

¹ Because the hot work permit provisions of the 2024 Rule reduced the permit retention requirement from five years to three, these provisions took effect immediately and remain in effect.

² Additional provisions of the 2024 Rules not mentioned above that also have compliance deadlines in 2027 include provisions related to incident investigation root cause analysis, which take effect on May 10, 2027; provisions related to emergency response procedures, which take effect on May 10, 2027; provisions requiring emergency response field exercises at least once every 10 years, which take effect on March 15, 2027; and provisions requiring updates and resubmission of risk management plans, which take effect on May 10, 2028.