#err debating over whether or not to post this but i like the photos and this one seems less well known so..

[taminoarticles]

— Tamino for The Line of Best Fit, 2019 (x)

[pynkhues]

Hi ! I'm sorry if you have already talked about that, I'm just new to the fandom. I just finished s3 and I've felt so conflicted since Lucy's death.. There was a sort of lightness in the show despite of the crime element and obvs flirtation between Brio.. But now, everything seems so dark and Beth is trying to kill him. I feel like there's been a shift and that they'll never be able to come back from it.. What are your thoughts ?? Thank you and stay safe !!

Hi! Welcome to the fandom, anon! :-) 

Season three definitely has a darker feel overall, so I completely understand why you feel conflicted! I think you’re right too - the balance between the lighter elements of the show and the darker ones was really different in s3 compared to seasons 1 and 2, and it gave the season a very different energy. Interestingly though, I don’t actually think the content itself was all that much darker, but rather that shift was felt more in the way that that content was framed and paced.

After all, violence – and the threat of violence – has been a pretty integral part of the show since it began, and while I think there’s a bit to be said about how much of the violence of the show made its way from subtext to text – Eddie’s death happened off-screen, but Lucy’s didn’t, for instance – I also think that there have been moments of textual violence since the show began. Beth knocked Boomer out with a whiskey bottle after he’d tried to rape Annie in the very first episode after all, something that was echoed with Boomer’s completed rape of Mary Pat and her hitting him with her car in 2.03. In that sense, the violence might’ve escalated in some ways across the first two seasons – culminating with Beth shooting Rio in 2.13 – but it’s always been a part of the DNA of the show overall.

In that sense, I think what’s really changed isn’t so much the violence and threat of violence itself, but rather the way that the show frames that violence and the effect that has on the pacing, tone and character beats.

So hey! Let’s break that down a little.

Catch and Release

When it comes to scenes of intense drama or violence – played out or inferred – Good Girls is really a show that, at least for its first two seasons, relies on a pretty defined structure that I’d say goes something like this:

1.    Contextual joke that builds tension and/or sets mood.

2.    Act of violence or drama.

3.    Throwaway joke that breaks tension and/or resets mood.

As a structure, it’s generally pretty effective and is ultimately used to manage the tone of the episode. After all, for a show like Good Girls which is a dramedy, leaning too hard on the joke or too hard on the drama can create the off-balanced feeling we got in s3, but I’ll come back to that later.

This structure essentially presents the violence or drama of the scene as the meat of a burger, allowing the jokes to both complete the meal (delicious!) while also softening up the richness or intensity of the meat itself.

Generally speaking, I’d say Good Girls did this quite simply and effectively in s1, experimented and tested the elastic of it in s2, and more or less got rid of one crucial step in s3. It makes for an interesting exploration of narrative structure, I think, but that’s just because I find this sort of stuff interesting to explore, haha.

So what’s that actually look like in action?

Okay, let’s take 1.01 with the scene I described above.

1.    Contextual joke that builds tension or sets mood

I’d say in this case it was the entire scene at the end of the episode where Annie, Beth and Ruby are arguing about what to do about Rio.

2.    Act of Violence

Boomer attempts to rape Annie, Beth hits Boomer, Boomer falls into the coffee table.

3.    Throwaway joke that breaks tension and resets mood.

And again in 1.02.

1.    Contextual joke that builds tension or sets mood

Annie trying to sell Rio on the dolls.

2.    Act of Violence

Rio ordering Mick to kill Beth.

3.    Throwaway joke that breaks tension and resets mood.

Boomer popping out of the treehouse.

(please forgive my horrible screencaps, I took these after I’d written this post and it’s now late, hahah)

Annnnd again in 1.04

1:

2:

3:

By 1.09, they were already starting to leave wider gaps between the jokes and the tension – which makes sense as it was building towards the climax and they were wanting more drama than comedy – but importantly, this framing was still present. 

1: The girls joking about the van job

2: The tense climax of the van job

3: The joke about the result of the tense climax

And in 2.01, it kept those gaps big as a direct continuation.

1.    Contextual joke that builds tension

Beth putting the mug on the coaster as she scrubs blood off her floor.

2.    Rio shooting Dean in a flashback.

3.    Annie and Ruby bickering about Annie stealing a hospital meal (tone reset as a result of violent climax)

The series went on to test this further in s2 by adding extra beats to create more complex (and interesting, in my opinion!) variations. The clearest example of this is in 2.03 with the Boomer and Mary Pat sequence:

1.    Tension establishing joke: the girls in the hotel bickering about the price of the room.

2.    An act of inferred violence – Boomer rapes Mary Pat

3.    An act of textual violence that builds off both the joke and the inferred violence of the previous scene – Mary Pat runs over Boomer.

4.    A throwaway joke as a tension breaker – Mary Pat worried her kids have heard only to see them engrossed in their devices while the Power of Love plays in the background.

5.    Takes us straight into an even better tension breaker joke with Mary Pat telling the girls she chopped Boomer up.

(That is such. good. snowballing. tension. And I could talk about it forever. Like, seriously. It’s not a sequence we talk about a lot, but 2.03 is an excellent example of complex dramedy writing).

That said, it often still fell back on that classic structure too in satisfying ways. 2.07 being a perfect example.

1.    Contextual joke to establish tension

2.    Tension / act of violence

3.    Tension breaker.

Whiiiich brings us to 2.13.

King

Look, 2.13 doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, but in no small part, it doesn’t work because it doesn’t play with the above structure like the Mary Pat and Boomer arc did in 2.03, nor test the elasticity of it like 1.09 and 2.01 do, rather it completely abandons it altogether.

It doesn’t build tension effectively through that blend of drama and comedy that the show can do really well, nor does it break it afterwards for us with a lighter moment that commentates on that tension, rather it thrusts the violence and drama onto us in a way that wasn’t well established narratively, and – quite frankly – was badly written.

I could talk a lot more about why that narrative choice doesn’t work, but that’s not really what we’re here to talk about. What we’re here to talk about is:

A Change of Pace

Because the thing is, season 3 does actually return to it’s s1 and s2 structure, only with one, crucial change.

It abandons Step 3: the joke that resets the mood.

What this means is that we have the contextual joke which establishes the tension and the mood, and the tension, but then the tension’s never actually broken for us afterwards.

This is perhaps clearest in 3.05 with Lucy’s murder.

1. We have the establishing joke with the girls debating which Au Jus hostage photo to use.

2. We have the act of violence.

And then we have only aftermath.

Ruby crawls into bed with Stan, Annie with Ben, and Beth takes Au Jus home.

On it’s own, I think this is an effective break from structure. I think it underscores the power of this sequence overall and the importance of Lucy’s death as a narrative moment and the ‘innocence lost’ theme. 

Only it’s not on it’s own.

The season kept breaking structure. Over and over again.

It happens after Rio kills Turner in 3.01 (there’s a slightly lighter scene that caps that with Rio checking out of the hotel, so you could kind of argue that it was returning to the same structure, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark for me), it happens when Rio confronts Beth in 3.03 and when he takes her to the OBGYN, it happens when Max tries to confront Rio at the bar in 3.06, and it happens in most of the scenes with the hitman.

In fact, I’d argue that the only scenes that returned to the catch and release structure in s3 were the scene where Ruby stole the hockey jersey, the carwash scene which ended with Mick wanting to go to IHOP and, most effectively, in the Sweet P’s job in 3.10.

You’re talking a lot about sequence structure here, Sophie. 

Right! Sorry! Tangents, haha.

What I’m getting at is that I don’t think the content of the show itself is any different. Murder, crime, intimidation and violence has been central to the show’s DNA since 1.01, and a lot of this has been textual. Lucy’s death I think definitely feels different because she’s the first true innocent we’ve seen killed on this show, but y’know, Rio was threatening to murder random PTA moms way back in 1.07 when Beth’s secret shopper scheme proved – err, unvetted, and Dean was trying to organise hitmen in s2 too.

Structure is important. Structure is what sets up audience expectations and establishes the rhythm of a story as well as – most importantly for this discussion – the tone of one. Seasons 1 and 2 presented the dramatic and comedic elements of the show ultimately as a marriage. The comedy was used frequently to guide us as viewers in and out of tension, and ultimately, I think this is why season 3 felt so different. That three point sequence structure was unbraided, the comedy divorced from the drama, which stuttered the rhythm and ultimately affected the tone.

SO, in answering your question as to whether or not the show can come back from the darkness to find its balance again, yeah, I think it can!

I think the writers sort of wrote themselves into a big, ugly corner with 2.13 and spent a lot of s3 struggling to find a way back out of it. Like, I think on a narrative and a character level, they had to show Rio kill someone in s3 to re-establish him as a character with teeth, because if they hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been the source of tension and conflict that they rely on him to be. I think they committed themselves to darker elements of Beth’s character and to asking the question of what it is the girls are capable of, because that’s the sort of thing you commit yourself to when you throw a grenade into your own story like they did with 2.13.

And look, I don’t think they got themselves out of it perfectly by any stretch of the imagination – in particular sacrificing parts of the way they typically structured tension in violence as they tried to reset the board meant they ultimately also chose to sacrifice both rhythm and tone too – but I think they were rebuilding by the end of s3. I think the Sweet P’s job was this show at it’s tonal best, with that marriage of comedy and anticipation and both personal and criminal stakes really working together to build a great sequence (Beth and the Caesar Salad! Anticipation building with Ruby and Stan as Stan figures out what’s happening! A crime plot! Stan coming through in the end!)  

I think the note the show chose to end the season on with the promise of Boland Bubbles, Ruby and Stan reconnecting and the first glimpse of Phoebe infiltrating the girls does reset the board in a way that leaves a lot more room for lightness than the end of season 2 did, while still offering hooks of conflict and tension too. I also think it allows for a return to the sort of sequence structure that lets the show balance it’s tone in a way that 2.13 frankly didn’t.  

Of course, that’s ultimately if they decide to return to it, haha. I hope they do, and I think we were heading there, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see! :-) 

[josephkitchen0]

What are the Best Essential Oils for Soap Making?

If you want naturally scented soap, what are the best essential oils for soap making? With all the oils out there, it’s important to know the pros and cons. And which not to use.

There are many factors when it comes to using fragrances in soap making. Do you know how to make essential oils at home? Are you using melt and pour soap bases or going all-out with the cold process? When it comes to finding the best essential oils for soap making, it matters what process you use.

Melt and pour soaps are the kindest to essential oils. Problems such as ricing and seizing aren’t a concern. But because the oil doesn’t have a chance to transform in the chemical reaction known as saponification, the good and bad properties of those oils can be much stronger.

Making soap at home is fun and easy!

Learn how to make laundry soap, dish soap and bar soap at home! YES! I want this Free Report »  

If you’re looking for the best essential oils for soap making, consider a few things. If you’re using melt and pour, the easiest of soap making techniques for beginners, disregard the parts about seizing and anchoring but pay even more attention to skin and respiratory reactions. If you’re making soap from scratch using cold or hot process methods, be especially mindful of how your oil will make the soap batter react.

Finding the Best Essential Oils for Soap Making

First, do oils’ benefits remain after saponification? I’m afraid there hasn’t been much research on that. The fragrance benefits, such as relaxation qualities of lavender, do remain. But skin-enhancing properties are most likely reduced because the oil is so diluted by the other soap ingredients. Because it’s unknown if the benefits remain, it’s also debatable whether the precautions are negated. So play it safe.

Pregnancy: Let’s put this one first because it can have the most impact. Some oils are just a bad idea for pregnant women. Tansy, which was commonly used as an abortifacient, in ancient and medieval times, should always be avoided. Strong fragrances may cause stomach upset during the first trimester. And fennel, hyssop, sage, and rosemary should never be used in the third trimester or any time blood pressure isn’t normal.

Oils which Are Not Skin-Safe: Called “hot” oils in natural health circles, some oils should always be diluted. High phenol levels, citrals, or cinnamic aldehyde can cause burning or irritation. Never add these oils directly to bath water, avoid contact with the eyes, and keep carrier oils around to dilute the culprit if it starts to burn.

If you wish to use these oils, dilute them as required, but be aware that those carrier oils may go rancid before the essential oils will. That means you may develop the rusty-orange flaw known as “dreaded orange spots.” DOS means your soap is going bad, though it is technically still safe to use.

Allergic Reactions: I once attended an in-home essential oils demonstration. The salesperson claimed that it’s impossible to be allergic to pure essential oils. Well, when my husband opened the lid and sniffed “pure” lavender oil from that high-quality multi-level-marketing company, his throat started to swell.

Play it safe with essential oils. If you’re deadly allergic to a plant, err on the side of caution instead of listening to someone who has read a short manual in order to sell oils. It is possible to experience allergic reactions from essential oils in soap. Some people even experience cross-sensitivity. This means, if you’re highly allergic to ragweed, you may react to chamomile oil.

Dermal sensitization is a type of allergic reaction. Though your first exposure to the oil may produce few reactions, each time you encounter it, the reaction becomes worse. Certain oils are more likely to cause dermal sensitization.

If you’re unsure how you will react to an oil, do a patch test before dumping a few tablespoons into a soap recipe. Dab a tiny bit on your skin. If the oil should not be used full-strength, mix it with a carrier oil at twice the recommended concentration to ensure you can judge reactions. Do not use that oil if you itch, develop a rash, hives, or blisters, or experience visceral reactions such as illness or breathing problems.

Phototoxicity: This means using the essential oil makes your skin more sensitive to burning in response to light. You don’t have to be allergic for it to happen. Just as some prescription medications make you more sensitive to sunburn, topical application of certain essential oils can do the same. Expressed citrus oils are especially culprit. If you want citrus fragrances, the best essential oils for soap making are distilled, not expressed. Sweet orange, yuzu, and tangerine are not known to cause phototoxicity.

Respiratory Sensitivity: Though some oils, like eucalyptus, make it easier to breathe, others do the opposite. My little sister is so sensitive to certain oils that just a whiff makes her cough and leave the room. Clove, peppermint, and thyme may irritate mucous membranes around the eyes or within the nose and lungs. Many essential oil gurus recommend testing suspect oils on the soles of feet before risking them closer to the face.

Photo by Shelley DeDauw

Seizing: Though this sounds painful and tragic, it’s only painful to soap-makers who had high hopes for their scented bars. Seizing is when the liquid soap batter suddenly hardens before you want it to. It occurs after “trace,” that moment when you can see a trace of the liquid on top of the surface. If you don’t transfer the soap to the mold, and fast, you could be stuck with a pot full of solid soap that you have to grate down and rebatch. Or the oil can cause a partial seize called “ricing,” where small rice-shaped lumps harden within the initial soap batter. Seized and riced soaps are still safe for use after they’ve been cured, but they’re aesthetically undesirable.

Floral and spice oils, such as cinnamon and clove, seize more than patchouli or cedar. And some soap may seize faster than others. Coconut oil soap recipes, especially those with a higher percentage of coconut compared to other oils, reach trace so fast that adding a floral or spicy essential oil can cause a hard lump of soap still in the pot.

A good recommendation for avoiding seizure, other than choosing the best essential oils for soap making, is to mix soap at a lower temperature. Some products heat up due to natural sugars, such as goat milk soap recipes, so it’s important to keep an eye on your batch. Another recommendation is to avoid elaborate swirls if you’re using an oil which may cause problems.

I’ve seen a crafter save a “seize” by clumping it immediately into molds. This left gaps and swirls, since the soap hardened so fast it was almost solid before she scooped it all out of the pan. Undeterred, she mixed a second batch, with a complimenting color and fragrance, which did not rise or seize. She poured that over the chunky soap, tapping the mold against the counter to fill in all air bubbles. The end result was beautiful.

Anchoring. Some oils, no matter the strength, will still not remain long in soap. Citrus oils and lavender are especially short-lived. This can be avoided by combining these flighty fragrances with anchoring scents. Good anchoring base notes include patchouli, cedarwood, vetiver, anise, and a few others. Professional soapmakers, who want unique products, research how to combine anchoring base notes, middle notes, and the desired top notes to create fragrance blends which smell good and stay in soap. If you’re a beginner and a professional crafter won’t share her trade secrets, purchase pre-blended soapmaking oils.

Where can you find the best information on essential oils for soap making? Here are some good links from Brambleberry and the National Association for Holistic Aromatherapy.

What do you think are the best essential oils for soap making? We want to hear about your experiences!

This is not a complete list. Individual sensitivity may make some oils more dangerous than others.

Avoid During Pregnancy Possible Skin Irritants Possible Mucous Membrane Irritants Oils Causing Phototoxicity Oils Which May Cause Soap Seizing Oils Which Need Anchoring Oils Which May Discolor Soap Aniseed, Basil, Birch, Camphor, Fennel, Hyssop, Mugwort, Parsley, Pennyroyal, Rosemary, Sage, Tansy, Tarragon, Thula, Wintergreen, Wormwood Bay, Backhousia, Cassia, Cinnamon, Clove, Citronella, Cumin, Lemongrass, Lemon Verbena, Inula, Oregano, Tagetes, Tea Absolute, Turpentine, Thyme, Peru Balsam Bay, Caraway, Cinnamon, Clove, Lemongrass, Peppermint, Thyme Angelica, Bergamot, Expressed Lemon, Lime, Grapefruit and Bitter Orange, Rue Florals, Spices such as Cinnamon and Clove Top-note scents such as citrus, fruity fragrances, lavender, and mint. Vanilla can make cold process soap turn dark brown. Use a stabilized vanilla fragrance oil. Dark-colored essential oils, such as patchouli, can add yellowish or brownish tones.

What are the Best Essential Oils for Soap Making? was originally posted by All About Chickens

[messwrites]

harley quinn

Basic Information

all information provided is for her main verse she is predominently comic based

-Fᴜʟʟ Nᴀᴍᴇ : Harleen Quinzel - Nɪᴄᴋɴᴀᴍᴇ(s) : Harley Quinn - Aɢᴇ : 32 - Hᴏᴍᴇᴛᴏᴡɴ : Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York / Gotham - Cᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛ Lᴏᴄᴀᴛɪᴏɴ : Gotham - Pʀᴏɴᴏᴜɴs : she/her/hers - Oʀɪᴇɴᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ : bisexual-biromantic - Oᴄᴄᴜᴘᴀᴛɪᴏɴ : criminal/funhouse owner - Lɪᴠɪɴɢ Aʀʀᴀɴɢᴇᴍᴇɴᴛs : loft - Lᴀɴɢᴜᴀɢᴇ(s) Sᴘᴏᴋᴇɴ : english, ASL, spanish - Aᴄᴄᴇɴᴛ : iconic Harley new yorker-ish???

Physical Appearance

- Fᴀᴄᴇ Cʟᴀɪᴍ : Natalie Dormer – Margot Robbie - Hᴀɪʀ Cᴏʟᴏᴜʀ : blonde - Eʏᴇ Cᴏʟᴏᴜʀ : blue - Hᴇɪɢʜᴛ : 5'2" - Wᴇɪɢʜᴛ : 140 lbs - Tᴀᴛᴛᴏᴏs :  TBD - Pɪᴇʀᴄɪɴɢs :  6 piercings on each ear - Usᴜᴀʟ Exᴘʀᴇssɪᴏɴ : pleasant, even friendly, perhaps a smile

Distinguishing Characteristics

- Pʜʏsɪᴄᴀʟ Aɪʟᴍᴇɴᴛs : no ailments, though she is classified as an enhanced-human. immunity to most drugs or toxins, and stronger than average strength - Nᴇᴜʀᴏʟᴏɢɪᴄᴀʟ Cᴏɴᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴs : undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed for the most part but, reoccurring manic depression, minor-treatable  case of paranoid schizophrenia, anxiety, - Aʟʟᴇʀɢɪᴇs : pollen, dust, pine nuts, and the full spectrum of human emotion - Sʟᴇᴇᴘɪɴɢ Hᴀʙɪᴛs : prone to extremes staying awake for days or sleeping for 18 hours - Eᴀᴛɪɴɢ Hᴀʙɪᴛs : forgets to eat occasionally unless reminded, idle snacker when bored. - Exᴇʀᴄɪsᴇ Hᴀʙɪᴛs : strives for peak human conditioning, usually developed through criminal activity or gymnastics - Eᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ Sᴛᴀʙɪʟɪᴛʏ : 3.7 out of 10, 10 being the highest. She’s got low impulse control, and is in the process of coping with an abusive relationship, feelings of lack of control, adrenaline junkie, lack of support system. She has a lot of baggage. Prone to extremes. - Sᴏᴄɪᴀʙɪʟɪᴛʏ : generally friendly, able to strike up a conversation,  quick to become rude or aggressive if she doesn’t get her way or someone says something she doesn’t like. - Dʀᴜɢ Usᴇ : occasional prescriptions, occasional recreation - Aʟᴄᴏʜᴏʟ Usᴇ : social drinker, occasionally morose.

Personality

- Pᴏsɪᴛɪᴠᴇ Tʀᴀɪᴛs : resourceful, candid, resilient, - Nᴇɢᴀᴛɪᴠᴇ Tʀᴀɪᴛs : tactless, unforgiving, naive - Gᴏᴀʟs/Dᴇsɪʀᴇs : to determine what she likes for herself, or what she likes because of a continued and lingering influence of the joker. To stand on her own two feet. - Fᴇᴀʀs : y'know, normal Harley stuff. //vague shrugging noises - Hᴏʙʙɪᴇs : tumbling, gymnastics, bartending, gaming - Hᴀʙɪᴛs : nail biting, hair twirling, leaving the cap off the toothpaste and losing it, consistently getting hungry at 2 AM if she’s awake.

Favorites

- Wᴇᴀᴛʜᴇʀ : sunny, cool, with a slight breeze - Cᴏʟᴏᴜʀ : pink - Mᴜsɪᴄ : something she can move to, doesn’t matter the genre, prefers pop, pop-punk, rap, and occasionally old r&b - Mᴏᴠɪᴇs : the brave little toaster makes her cry - Sᴘᴏʀᴛ : derby - Bᴇᴠᴇʀᴀɢᴇ : root beer mixed with beer, or shirley temples - Fᴏᴏᴅ : junk food - Aɴɪᴍᴀʟ : hyenas

Family

- Fᴀᴛʜᴇʀ : out of the picture - Mᴏᴛʜᴇʀ : out of the picture - Sɪʙʟɪɴɢ(s) : estranged little siblings - Cʜɪʟᴅʀᴇɴ : none - Pᴇᴛ(s) : lou and bud, two hyenas - Fᴀᴍɪʟʏ’s Fɪɴᴀɴᴄɪᴀʟ Sᴛᴀᴛᴜs : broke

Extra:

- Zᴏᴅɪᴀᴄ Sɪɢɴ : virgo - MBTI : ESFP - Eɴɴᴇᴀɢʀᴀᴍ : The Romantic - Tᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴀᴍᴇɴᴛ : sanguine - Hᴏɢᴡᴀʀᴛs Hᴏᴜsᴇ : Slytherin - Mᴏʀᴀʟ Aʟɪɢɴᴍᴇɴᴛ : chaotic-good - Pʀɪᴍᴀʀʏ Vɪᴄᴇ : envy - Pʀɪᴍᴀʀʏ Vɪʀᴛᴜᴇ : charity

characterization notes :

Harley is not in love with the Joker, he’s more like a stain she can’t get out, he will always have an effect on her, but whether that effect is a positive one is largely debatable.

Currently Harley lives in an apartment complex she owns out at Coney Island, no other villains live with her though she treats her tenants like friends and even family.

Characterization is largely based off the Suicide Squad comic, she’s just freshly left the squad, roughly a year ago, and her personality is conflicted, she’s currently caught trying to discover who exactly she is, she’s torn between liking the things she does, and desperately wondering if her reason for liking that is because of the Joker’s continued influence over her.

While a little silly and kooky Harley is manic and has very low impulse control, it leads to her doing things without really worrying about the consequences, as well as simply not caring how others may perceive things. She has very little inhibitions.

Harley has gone back to going by what she perceives as her ‘maiden’ name, introducing herself as Harley Quinzel.

Harley considers diamonds to be a bit of a calling card, and while she no longer associates them with the clown she once was, she now thinks of them in the terms of ‘diamonds are a girl’s best friend’

Biography

comic based. post suicide-squad.

content warnings for: implied child abuse and child neglect and abandonment, manipulation, vague very vague references to abuse , codependent/unhealthy/toxic relationship. Implied drug abuse, implied alcoholism. I tried to err on the side of caution and warn for anything at all I could possibly think of.

Do you know what responsibility feels like? For Harleen it felt like a neglectful abusive mother and a con man father, and two twins half her age that she tucked in at night and soothed through nightmares. For Harleen it was endless schoolwork and never going to parties, and do you have any idea how hard it is to hit puberty and have no one to turn to? She does.

See the thing is, was, that her house was hectic, loud, chaotic, when you have kids raising kids they either grow up fast or they end up dead. Harleen was by no means perfect, but she tried, boy did she ever, she didn’t get a childhood, lying to teachers about where her mother was (passed out on the couch no doubt) what her father did (lied his way to the bank). What happened to her arm?

Oh Ma’am I fell is all, I was running and my brother got in my way, I didn’t want to land on him, and I hit the wall instead.

Harley counted the years, it wasn’t a running tally, she didn’t mark it down, she didn’t even mean to, fifth grade, lying to teachers and other parents, lying, lying, lying, she got really fucking good at it. Eight more years. She was lucky really, lucky that one of the parents paid attention even when she swore they didn’t, even if they came to the wrong conclusion. Sure it was a conclusion she helped them too, but it was better than nothing. She ended up having a place to run away to when she needed it, gymnastics, she hadn’t ever been afraid, not for a long time. It was no surprise she was fearless on the mats. She spent her time running or hiding, and always lying. Daddy’s little girl, taking after him when all she ever got was a pat on the head and some useless information she didn’t ever think she’d need.

The best way to pick a pocket is with your index and middle finger, remember Pumpkin.

Turns out she did need it, because her mother wasn’t picking herself up off the floor any time soon and her little siblings were hungry, school lunches couldn’t make up for a missing dinner, three nights of the week. She had a job of course, working at the local corner store, but someone had to take care of her siblings, just eleven years old, she didn’t want to leave them alone just yet, after all, two more years were all they had with her before they’d be alone again. At least, she thought, bagging groceries a handful of hours a week, at least they’d have each other. In between studying and work, looking after her siblings she was swamped, barely had time to go to that old gym, not that she didn’t make time. That didn’t pay the bills though, it didn’t fill their bellies either, so she took to stealing, a little here, a little there, just enough to keep them afloat, never from people who looked like they would need it. She hit tourists in time square, she hit fat cats in Manhattan, she did what she needed to do.

That’s all she ever did. What she needed to do.

She was eighteen, hard working, young, and fresh faced with idealism, her siblings hugged her before she got on the bus, two suitcases all she had to her name and no family that would ever visit her. It was worth it. Harleen Quinzel, a scholarship student at Gotham University with a full ride, a slot on the gymnastics team, no kids to look after, she’d gotten all the freedom she could ever want, or so she thought.

Harleen was infinitely interested in psychology, she wanted to, well, understand her parents, what had made them what they were today, what choices they’d made, because it wasn’t always this way she was sure. Knows from nights of hugging old picture frames to her chest in the dark, knows from the photos of them as a family, her father holding her in his arms and her mother smiling at the camera. The more extreme the personality, the more interested she was, it wasn’t any surprise that Harleen gravitated toward the Joker, not to her anyway.

She’d originally planned on simply diagnosing him, dissecting him and writing a book, Harleen Quinzel, the woman who rehabilitated the Joker, it was going to be her way of beating her family. Not a criminal, not an alcoholic, nothing like that at all, she was going to be something great, and she’d take care of her siblings, and…well, she’d do this whole living thing right. By the time she graduated, finished her thesis and begun her tenure at Arkham, Harleen had a plan. Three months in and after countless hours of needling and prodding she finally got what she wanted. Her first session with the infamous Joker and it was everything she thought it’d be an more.

See, Harley was smart, Harley had a plan, after all, what do you do to get on the good side of a clown? It seemed simple enough, make him laugh. No one has any idea how many witness reports and videos she went through of the Joker, no one has any idea to this day how long she spent workshopping that first joke. She knew that first joke, that first impression would make or break this, though, she didn’t know just how true that would be. He hadn’t reacted well to any of the orthodox techniques, and why would he, unorthodox was sort of her specialty though.

“I’m your new psychologist, Doctor Harleen Quinzel, but you can call me Harley Quinn. Like the clown. Get it?”

He’d stared at her for one unwavering moment, eyes dark and then he’d thrown his head back and laughed, carefree, wild, cracked laughter that echoed off the walls and sent chills down her spine, goosebumps over her skin.

“Why Harley, are flirting with me?”

Their initial meeting had been explosive, his hands around her neck, his lips stretched wide over teeth that glinted in the florescents as he laughed. By the time he’d backed off cackling, ‘it’s a joke a joke I swear!’ she’d had a pen in her grip the point of it ready to go into him. She didn’t release her white knuckled grip on it even as she smiled tightly at him, lipstick smudged over her cheek and hair in disarray.

“Mister Joker, touch me again and I’ll show you you how we did it back in Bensonhurst, your balls will be so far up your throat they get lost in your vocal cords.”

That started a rapport that surprised everyone, Harley included. It was easier she found to not be professional, to ask questions here or there and let him talk, some sessions he’d try and pull her heart strings, some sessions he’d tell her about how to make a car battery bomb. She can’t describe what happened, not really not to this day, she was a master of lies, she’d been lying her whole life after all.

People think she just went mad one day, or she’d been manipulated, tricked into loving him from a little sob story like she didn’t have one of her own. She doesn’t know when she fell in love with the Joker, maybe it was somewhere between the fake story about his dad and the real story about the bank robbing, maybe it was the way he looked at her like she was the only interesting thing he got to see all day, maybe it was the fact she’d deluded herself into thinking she could understand. That she was the one person who could understand. Or maybe it was none of that at all.

Maybe she was just tired of doing what she was supposed to, tired of responsibility, tired of putting on her glasses and her little white coat and having a fine night and a fine day and waking up and looking back and realizing that her life had been one big long line of fine with nothing to break it up but misery and the only time she felt like she could do more, be more was when the Joker was talking to her. When she realized that laws have power because people gave them power and if enough people just stopped trying to be so damn responsible it would all be chaos out there. It almost already was.

Welcome to Gotham City, home of the criminally deranged.

She doesn’t know what made her break him out the first time, she has no idea what finally broke her, no, that’s a lie, when he’d escaped without her help she’d gone to the scene of his crime, police tape and sirens and screaming and fire, she’d gone to the lights and the noise and she’d looked at the aftermath of what he’d done and she’d laughed. One man had done all of this? He made her efficiency look like wasting time. She watched the news zealously for any trace of him, listened as people who didn’t know him dissected him on TV, so-called professionals giving their opinion and they were all so fucking stupid. They didn’t get it at all, they never would.

When the Joker returned to Arkham, bruised, beaten, Harleen took one look at him and decided this wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to just feel special when he looked at her in these four walls, because one day he wouldn’t be able to look at her anymore. One day he’d die, one day he’d be sent to prison, one day a lot of things and she couldn’t handle that, couldn’t deal with the thought of not being special anymore, because the Joker. He was what made her days great, more than just fine. He was what made her feel like she was more than just a little lab rat in heels and a coat.

Turns out her boss the good Doc Serano had stolen her notes. All of them, every single one of them on the Joker, and you know what, terrible work ethic aside, she learned something about the Joker much quicker than Harley did. Doctor Serano learned that one Harleen Quinzel was in love with him. There was a fight, a broken picture frame, a cut face, and before she knew it she was running down the hall to the surprised shout of security.

‘Is one of the patients loose?!’

Not yet. She let the Joker out to the sound of laughter and explained things in a rush, surrounded by flashing lights, mad screams and the facility going into high security he pulled her close and he hugged her, his large hand cradled the back of her head.

The chemical plant was horrifying to behold, nailed shut dilapidated railing and broken windows, the place had an air of desperation and the broken boards stood stark like bared teeth. She tried to run, of course she did, she’d wanted, something, to feel special and, this, this was too far, but The Joker, he was always faster than her wasn’t he? One step ahead of her. Into the mix she went, stir once, stir twice, drain and ta dah, Harley Quinn was born.

Lou and Bud her precious baby boys were the first gift she ever got from the Joker, a birthday present for a girl who had been baptized again, reborn in chemicals and washed clean.

Goodbye Harleen and helloooooooo Harley.

They wreaked havoc, they destroyed the city, lit it up with fire and laughter and well, love. The city never knew crime until the two of them brought it on with the force of a tsunami, they destroyed that place, wrecked lives, bought cops, laughed and laughed and laughed until there was nothing but laughter and screams in the night.

Then one day he got put away, locked up in Arkham and the key thrown away, Harley was in a different part of the city at the time, distracting the police during the big confrontation with the Bat. She escaped custody, just for long enough to get revenge on every lawyer that helped put him away, she was gonna dance with every one, gonna show him she could make her Puddin proud. Pile them so high he’d have to notice her.

Well, Belle Reeve was more, some knockout gas, a nanobomb necktie and a new cutie to play house with Harley got it all. It was hard in the beginning, tortured for information she didn’t have to prove to a jury she didn’t know that she wouldn’t rat them out. Amanda Waller was her jailer and her judge and her executioner, she was sent out on missions, the sort of thing she wouldn’t bother with normally, where’s the artistry? The laughs? Sure, it wasn’t boring but it wasn’t fun, not really, secret government missions and the constant threat of death, the idea sounds like a ball of laughs but it got old really fast. Turns out there’s nothing good, or fun, or hell even funny about following orders and laying your life on the line for things you don’t care about, people you don’t care about. That’s the thing, she doesn’t mind almost dying if it’s for something she gives a damn about but Waller’s little playdates with world governments and secret shenanigans? She couldn’t give a rats ass.

Harley played a little too fast and loose, heard the Joker came back, took out the kid, played it fast and loose like her, but that wasn’t the deal. See, her and Puddin was always after the bat, not the kiddies, they were kids, you know, she always thought they’d have some one day, settle down with Bud and Lou and a bunch of brats. You don’t bring the kids into a domestic. What happened to the commissioners kid that was about the worst thing Harley had ever heard, she denied it, said there was no way that her Puddin could do something like that, that wasn’t a joke, that wasn’t madness, that was just sick. And they never went that far, never would. Until he did.

Harley almost died, turns out things ain’t so good on the outside, not as cushy as it is inside, and Harley went a little bit cuckoo for cocoa puffs there for awhile, life went Looney Tunes and she was tired. Tired of Waller’s games, tired of being manipulated, Waller sent someone to her, quite the looker since he was a replica of her Puddin. And he said the sweetest things, all the things she’d heard when she stepped out of that chemical bath, oh she knew what Waller was playing at. Of course she knew, when the fake tried to knife her between the ribs and the new Robin Hood of their merry band of fuck ups stepped out of the shadows to save her. She wasn’t so easy to play, Waller had to learn. It was easy to slip that pretty little knife between his ribs and tell Waller she was done.

That’s when the fun began, a prison riot, a bitch taken hostage and her life sentence was shortened up. One year. One more year. It’s a good thing Harley got good at counting years. Harley got out of Suicide Squad, she did. she left them, and she left the Joker too, gonna make her own way, she figures she’s been gone long enough. It’s time for her to go home.

Verses

verse: 001. main verse, comic based, canon-divergent, headcanon driven

verse: 002. SS Squad film-novel verse, headcanon driven, FC: Margot Robbie

verse: 003. Pre-Arkham verse, canon divergent, fc: Emily Kinney // Margot Robbie

verse: 004. different strokes. AU verse where Harley becomes drawn to a different member of the Rogues and becomes their partner in crime rather then the Joker’s, fc: dependent

verse: 005. hero doctor, Harley sets herself up post-squad as a psychiatrist for villains and almost reluctantly heroes as well

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TRUMP RULES: Why Has the E.P.A. Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Helps Call the Shots

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/trump-rules-why-has-the-e-p-a-shifted-on-toxic-chemicals-an-industry-insider-helps-call-the-shots/

TRUMP RULES: Why Has the E.P.A. Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Helps Call the Shots

The changes directed by Dr. Beck may result in an “underestimation of the potential risks to human health and the environment” caused by PFOA and other so-called legacy chemicals no longer sold on the market, the Office of Water’s top official warned in a confidential internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

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Dr. Beck testifying at a Senate hearing in March. She joined the E.P.A. in May after working as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main trade association. Credit U.S. Senate Committee Channel

The E.P.A.’s abrupt new direction on legacy chemicals is part of a broad initiative by the Trump administration to change the way the federal government evaluates health and environmental risks associated with hazardous chemicals, making it more aligned with the industry’s wishes.

It is a cause with far-reaching consequences for consumers and chemical companies, as the E.P.A. regulates some 80,000 different chemicals, many of them highly toxic and used in workplaces, homes and everyday products. If chemicals are deemed less risky, they are less likely to be subjected to heavy oversight and restrictions.

The effort is not new, nor is the decades-long debate over how best to identify and assess risks, but the industry has not benefited from such highly placed champions in government since the Reagan administration. The cause was taken up by Dr. Beck and others in the administration of President George W. Bush, with some success, and met with resistance during the Obama administration. Now it has been aggressively revived under President Trump by an array of industry-backed political appointees and others.

Dr. Beck, who has a doctorate in environmental health, comes from a camp — firmly backed by the chemical industry — that says the government too often directs burdensome rules at what she has called “phantom risks.”

Other scientists and administrators at the E.P.A., including Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, until last month the agency’s top official overseeing pesticides and toxic chemicals, say the dangers are real and the pushback is often a tactic for deflecting accountability — and shoring up industry profits at the expense of public safety.

Document

E.P.A.’s Decision Not to Ban Chlorpyrifos

The New York Times requested copies of email correspondence related to the March 2017 decision by the E.P.A. to reject a decade-old petition to ban chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide that research suggests may cause developmental delays in children exposed to it in drinking water or in farming communities. Here are those documents.

OPEN Document

Since Mr. Trump’s election, Dr. Beck’s approach has been unabashedly ascendant, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former E.P.A. and White House officials, confidential E.P.A. documents, and materials obtained through open-record requests.

Continue reading the main story

In March, Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. chief, overrode the recommendation of Ms. Hamnett and agency scientists to ban the commercial use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, blamed for developmental disabilities in children.

The E.P.A.’s new leadership also pressed agency scientists to re-evaluate a plan to ban certain uses of two dangerous chemicals that have caused dozens of deaths or severe health problems: methylene chloride, which is found in paint strippers, and trichloroethylene, which removes grease from metals and is used in dry cleaning.

“It was extremely disturbing to me,” Ms. Hamnett said of the order she received to reverse the proposed pesticide ban. “The industry met with E.P.A. political appointees. And then I was asked to change the agency’s stand.”

The E.P.A. and Dr. Beck declined repeated requests to comment that included detailed lists of questions.

“No matter how much information we give you, you would never write a fair piece,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in an email. “The only thing inappropriate and biased is your continued fixation on writing elitist clickbait trying to attack qualified professionals committed to serving their country.”

Before joining the E.P.A., Ms. Bowman was a spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council.

The conflict over how to define risk in federal regulations comes just as the E.P.A. was supposed to be fixing its backlogged and beleaguered chemical regulation program. Last year, after a decade of delays, Congress passed bipartisan legislation that would push the E.P.A. to determine whether dozens of chemicals were so dangerous that they should be banned or restricted.

The chemical safety law was passed after Congress and the chemical industry reached a consensus that toxic chemical threats — or at least the fear of them — were so severe that they undermined consumer confidence in products on the market.

But now the chemical industry and many of the companies that use their compounds are praising the Trump administration’s changed direction, saying new chemicals are getting faster regulatory reviews and existing chemicals will benefit from a less dogmatic approach to determining risk.

Continue reading the main story

“U.S. businesses, jobs and competitiveness depend on a functioning new chemicals program,” Calvin M. Dooley, a former congressman who is president of the American Chemistry Council, said in a statement. It was issued in June after Dr. Beck, his recent employee, pushed through many industry-friendly changes in her new role at the E.P.A., including the change in tracking legacy chemicals such as PFOA.

Anne Womack Kolton, a vice president at the council, said on Wednesday that Dr. Beck’s appointment was a positive development.

“We, along with many others, are glad that individuals who support credible science and thorough analysis as the basis for policymaking have agreed to serve,” she said in an email. “Consistency, transparency and high quality science in the regulatory process are in everyone’s interests.”

The Trump administration’s shift, the industry has acknowledged, could have financial benefits. Otherwise, the industry may lose “millions of dollars and years of research invested in a chemical,” the American Chemistry Council and other groups wrote in a legal brief defending the changes Dr. Beck had engineered.

But consumer advocates and many longtime scientists, managers and administrators at the E.P.A. are alarmed by the administration’s priorities and worry that the new law’s anticipated crackdown on hazardous chemicals could be compromised.

Dr. Beck, left, and Ms. Hamnett, center, who clashed over changes to new toxic chemical rules, attended a signing ceremony with Mr. Pruitt. Video by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Video by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

“You are never going to have 100 percent certainty on anything,” Ms. Hamnett said. “But when you have a chemical that evidence points to is causing fatalities, you err more on the side of taking some action, as opposed to ‘Let’s wait and spend some more time and try to get the science entirely certain,’ which it hardly ever gets to be.”

The divergent approaches and yearslong face-off between Ms. Hamnett and Dr. Beck parallel the story of the chemical industry’s quest to keep the E.P.A.’s enforcement arm at bay.

The two women, one a lawyer from New Jersey, the other a scientist from Long Island, have dedicated their lives to the issue of hazardous chemicals. Each’s expertise is respected by her peers, but their perspectives couldn’t be more dissimilar.

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Ms. Hamnett, 63, spent her entire 38-year career at the E.P.A., joining the agency directly from law school as a believer in consumer and environmental protections. Dr. Beck, 51, did a fellowship at the E.P.A., but has spent most of her 29-year career elsewhere: in a testing lab at Estée Lauder, as a toxicologist in the Washington State Health Department, as a regulatory analyst in the White House and most recently with the chemical industry’s trade group.

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Ms. Hamnett in Falls Church, Va. Last month, she retired as the top official overseeing pesticides and toxic chemicals at the E.P.A. “I had become irrelevant,” she said about changes there under the Trump administration. Credit Jared Soares for The New York Times

Before Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Hamnett would have been regarded as the hands-down victor in their professional tug of war. Her decision to retire in September amounted to a surrender of sorts, a powerful acknowledgment of the two women’s reversed fortunes under the Trump administration.

“I had become irrelevant,” Ms. Hamnett said.

Her farewell party in late August was held in the wood-paneled Map Room on the first floor of the E.P.A. headquarters, the same room where Mr. Trump had signed an executive order backed by big business that called for the agency to dismantle environmental protections.

Dr. Beck was among those who spoke. She thanked Ms. Hamnett for her decades of service. “I don’t know what I am going to do without her,” she said, according to multiple people who attended the event.

Ms. Hamnett, in an interview, said she had little trouble envisioning the future under the new leadership. “It’s time for me to go,” she said. “I have done what I could do.”

‘Unreasonable Risk of Injury’

Chemical regulation was not part of the E.P.A.’s original mission. But several environmental disasters in the early 1970s prompted Congress to extend the agency’s authority.

Industrial waste, including highly toxic PCBs, led to fish kills in the Hudson River. Chemicals from flame retardants were detected in livestock in Michigan, contaminating food across the state. And residents in Niagara Falls, N.Y., first started to notice a black, oily liquid in their basements, early hints of one of the worst environmental disasters in United States history: Love Canal.

President Gerald R. Ford signed the Toxic Substances Control Act in October 1976, giving the E.P.A. the authority to ban or restrict chemicals it deemed dangerous. It was hailed as a public health breakthrough.

Continue reading the main story

“For the first time, the law empowers the federal government to control and even to stop production or use of chemical substances that may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or environment,” a federal report said.

A few years later, after graduating from George Washington University Law School in 1979, Ms. Hamnett landed at the E.P.A. She arrived fully embracing its enhanced mission.

She had grown up in Trenton, where the words “Trenton Makes, the World Takes” are affixed in neon to the side of a railroad bridge spanning the Delaware River.

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A bridge over the Delaware River in Trenton, N.J., says, “Trenton Makes, the World Takes.” The Roebling Steel Company plant brought prosperity to the region, but also contaminated soil and groundwater with hazardous chemicals. Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press

Her childhood memories included passing by the 200-acre Roebling Steel Company plant — named after the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. At its peak, the plant was Trenton’s largest employer, and it helped spread prosperity to the region.

But the company was also a chronic polluter. For decades, it dumped arsenic, chromium, lead and other hazardous chemicals, contaminating soil and groundwater. Ultimately, the pollution was so pervasive that the E.P.A. declared the property a Superfund cleanup site.

It was this legacy, as well as the congressional directive to the E.P.A. to protect the public from harm, that Ms. Hamnett said guided her.

During the Bush administration, she was drawn into a contentious debate involving lead paint that highlighted her resolve — and that of her opponents.

Few environmental hazards are as well understood as the dangers of lead in paint. Since it was first used in homes in the United States, more than a century ago, it has poisoned children. Even after it was banned in the late 1970s, it remained a threat, particularly when renovations took place in the tens of millions of homes with lead-based paint.

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The E.P.A. set out to establish standards governing home renovations, and Ms. Hamnett came to the discussions with a strong perspective.

“What is the effect of exposure likely to be?” she recalled asking. “If it is likely to be a severe effect and result in a significant number of people exposed, if so, I am going to err on the side of safety.”

While the evidence was solid that lead caused learning disabilities and other problems for children, it was less definitive on whether it was also a factor in adult diseases.

To Ms. Hamnett and her colleagues, the results of multiple studies were compelling enough to establish an apparent link to cardiovascular disease in adults. They concluded in a report in 2006 that there was “stronger evidence for a relationship between lead exposure and blood pressure for adults,” citing it as a factor for aggressive safety requirements.

The home renovation industry filed protests over the “inappropriate and costly” rule with the Bush administration and Congress. Taking up its cause was a White House official with a reputation for assessing risk much differently: Dr. Beck.

Throwing ‘Sand in the Gears’

As the Bush administration took office, John D. Graham, who ran the White House office overseeing regulations, unveiled a plan to ease the government’s burden on business by reining in “the regulatory state.”

To that end, Mr. Graham hired scientists to review major federal regulations and make recommendations about their worthiness, something the E.P.A. itself had done over the years.

Dr. Beck, Mr. Graham said, was an excellent addition to his staff.

She had grown up in Oyster Bay, N.Y., an affluent suburb on Long Island, earned an undergraduate microbiology degree in 1988 from Cornell and a doctorate from the University of Washington a decade later. Her dissertation, which examined how the sedative phenobarbital impacts the metabolism of the liver, started with words still relevant to her today: “Each day the human body is confronted with many potentially toxic substances in the form of food items, medicinal products and environmental agents.”

Continue reading the main story

She started her career at Estée Lauder, where she helped develop preservatives used to extend the shelf life of cosmetics, and also designed laboratory tests to determine if products caused adverse reactions when applied to skin.

When Mr. Graham hired her, she had been working as a science fellow at the E.P.A.’s center for environmental reviews. He described her as having “street smarts and thick skin,” someone who did not need the limelight to be effective.

“Dr. Beck is easy to underestimate,” Mr. Graham said in an email.

When the proposed lead paint rule came along in 2006, Dr. Beck, in her White House role, pressed Ms. Hamnett and others in the E.P.A. to revise the language to diminish the link to cardiovascular disease in adults, Ms. Hamnett recalled, before letting the rule go into effect.

That was one marker in Dr. Beck’s journey to redefine the way the government evaluates risk. Though they repeatedly found themselves on opposite sides, Ms. Hamnett said that, in a way, she admired Dr. Beck’s effort during those years.

She described Dr. Beck as a voracious reader of scientific studies and agency reports, diving deep into footnotes and scientific data with a rigor matched by few colleagues. She combed through thousands of comments submitted on proposed rules. And she had a habit of reading the Federal Register, the daily diary of new federal rules.

All of it made Dr. Beck an intimidating and confident adversary, Ms. Hamnett recalled. “She’s very smart and very well informed,” she said.

But there was a destructive side to that confidence, others said. In particular, Dr. Beck was seen as an enemy of scientists and risk assessors at the E.P.A., willing to challenge the validity of their studies and impose her own judgment, said Robert M. Sussman, a lawyer who represented chemical industry clients during the Bush administration and later became an E.P.A. lawyer and policy adviser under the Obama administration.

“Her goal was to throw sand in the gears to stop things from going forward,” said Mr. Sussman, who now is counsel to Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a coalition of consumer and environmental groups.

Continue reading the main story

Jack Housenger, a biologist who served as the director of the E.P.A.’s pesticide program, had a more positive recollection. He said Dr. Beck asked reasonable questions about his findings related to a wood preservative used in playgrounds and outdoor decks that was being pulled from the market.

“She wanted us to present the uncertainties and ranges of risk,” said Mr. Housenger, who retired this year. “She was trying to understand the methodology.”

Paul Noe, a lawyer who worked with Dr. Beck during the Bush administration, also said her critics got her wrong.

“What you really want to do as a government is to set priorities,” he said. “If you don’t have a realistic way of distinguishing significant risks from insignificant ones, you are just going to get bogged down and waste significant resources, and that can impede public health and safety.”

One of the harshest criticisms of Dr. Beck’s tenure in the Bush White House came in 2007 from the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences, which examined a draft policy she helped write proposing much stricter controls over the way the government evaluates risks.

“The committee agrees that there is room for improvement in risk assessment practices in the federal government,” the review said, but it described Dr. Beck’s suggestions as “oversimplified” and “fundamentally flawed.” It recommended her proposal be withdrawn.

Document

E.P.A. and Toxic Chemical Rules

An internal struggle has broken out in the Environmental Protection Agency over how to regulate toxic chemicals. These documents tell the backstory of the tension, which emerged after the Trump administration named an industry insider as a top agency regulator.

OPEN Document

Dr. Beck was so aggressive in second-guessing E.P.A. scientists that she became central to a special investigation by the House Committee on Science and Technology.

The committee obtained copies of her detailed emails to agency officials and accused her of slowing progress in confirming drinking-water health threats presented by chemicals like perchlorate, used in rocket fuel. “Suppression of Environmental Science by the Bush Administration’s Office of Management and Budget,” the committee wrote in 2009, before describing Dr. Beck’s actions.

Continue reading the main story

The opposition became so intense that Dr. Beck’s efforts started to get shut down.

First, the new risk assessment policy she had proposed was formally withdrawn. Then, after Mr. Obama took office in 2009, Mr. Sussman recalled going to the White House along with Lisa P. Jackson, the new E.P.A. administrator, to ask for a commitment to curb Dr. Beck’s power.

“We told them that we need the White House out of the E.P.A. science program,” Mr. Sussman said. “We demanded that. And we got it.”

Continuing the Fight

During Mr. Obama’s first term, Dr. Beck left the White House for the American Chemistry Council, whose members include Dow, DuPont and dozens of other major manufacturers and chemical companies.

As the trade association’s senior regulatory scientist, she was perfectly positioned to continue her second-guessing of the E.P.A.’s science.

Now her detailed criticisms of the agency came on trade association letterhead and in presentations at agency meetings and events.

“If the same person says the same thing three times, does this create a weight of evidence?” Dr. Beck said in a presentation in 2013, essentially mocking the scientific standards at the agency.

E.P.A. records show her challenging the agency’s scientific conclusions related to arsenic (used to manufacture semiconductors), tert-Butanol (used in perfumes and as an octane booster in gasoline), and 1-bromopropane (used in dry cleaning).

Her point was often the same: Did the scientists producing work that federal regulators relied on adequately justify all of the conclusions about any risks?

“Scientists today are more prolific than ever,” she said in a November 2014 presentation, later adding that “unfortunately, many of the scientific studies we read about in the news were not quite ready for prime time.”

Continue reading the main story

But at the same time, the industry was confronting a much larger existential problem.

E.P.A. and government-funded academic researchers were raising serious health questions about the safety of a range of chemicals, including flame retardants in furniture and plastics in water bottles and children’s toys. Consumer confidence in the industry was eroding.

Some state legislatures, frustrated by the E.P.A.’s slow response and facing a consumer backlash, moved to increase their own authority to investigate and act on the problems — threatening the chemical industry with an unwieldy patchwork of state rules and regulations.

Dr. Beck and other chemical industry representatives were dispatched to the E.P.A. and Congress to press for changes to the federal regulatory system that would standardize testing of the most worrisome existing chemicals and improve and accelerate the evaluation of new ones.

The resulting law, passed last year with Democratic and Republican support, gave both sides something they wanted. The chemical industry got pre-emption from most new state regulations, and environmentalists got assurances that new chemicals would be evaluated on health and safety risks alone, not financial considerations.

It was the most significant overhaul of the Toxic Substances Control Act since its enactment in the 1970s, and once again Ms. Hamnett was prepared to help shepherd it into place. The task was shaping up to be what she considered her final, crowning act at the E.P.A.

Ms. Hamnett was invited to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a part of the White House complex, to be present as Mr. Obama signed the bill into law. She was so excited that she arrived early and sneaked up to the stage to look at the papers Mr. Obama would be signing.

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President Barack Obama signing a chemical safety bill in June last year. Credit Zach Gibson for The New York Times

“Protecting people and the environment for decades to come,” she said, recalling her thoughts, as she excitedly stood on the stage. “At least, that is what we planned.”

Turning the Tables

They gathered in early June around a long conference table at the E.P.A. headquarters, the sunlight shining in from Constitution Avenue. In the crowd were Dr. Beck, Ms. Hamnett and other top agency officials charged with regulating toxic chemicals, as well as environmentalists worried about last-minute changes to rules being pushed by the chemical industry.

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Olga Naidenko, an immunologist specializing in children’s health, said she was struck by the head-spinning scene. Dr. Beck, who had spent years trying to influence Ms. Hamnett and others to issue rules friendly to the chemical industry, was now sitting at the conference table as a government decision maker.

“I am running the show. I am now in the chair. And it is mine,” Dr. Naidenko, said, describing her impressions of Dr. Beck at the gathering.

The Obama-era leadership at the E.P.A., in its last weeks, had published drafts of two critical rules needed to start the new chemical program. The rules detailed how the agency would choose the most risky chemicals to be tested or evaluated and how the hazards should be judged.

It would be up to Mr. Pruitt, the new E.P.A. chief, and his team to complete the process in time for a June deadline, set in the legislation.

Dr. Naidenko, a staff scientist at the Environmental Working Group, was there to plead with the agency to ignore a request from the American Chemistry Council to make more than a dozen last-minute changes, some pushed by Dr. Beck while she was at the council.

Dr. Beck did not seem convinced, recalled Dr. Naidenko and one of her colleagues, Melanie Benesh, a lawyer with the same organization.

“Tell me why you are concerned. What is it about?” Ms. Benesh and Ms. Hamnett each said they recalled Dr. Beck saying.

In fact, behind the scenes, the deed was already done.

Before Dr. Beck’s arrival, representatives from the E.P.A.’s major divisions had agreed on final wording for the rules that would be sent to the White House for approval. But they were told to wait until May 1, when Dr. Beck began her job as the acting assistant administrator for chemical safety.

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Dr. Beck then spent her first weeks on the job pressing agency staff to rewrite the standards to reflect, in some cases, word for word, the chemical industry’s proposed changes, three staff members involved in the effort said. They asked not to be named for fear of losing their jobs.

Dr. Beck had unusual authority to make it happen.

When she was hired by the Trump administration, she was granted the status of “administratively determined” position. It is an unusual classification that means she was not hired based on a competitive process — as civil servants are — and she was also not identified as a political appointee. There are only about a dozen such posts at the E.P.A., among the 15,800 agency employees, and the jobs are typically reserved for technical experts, not managers with the authority to give orders.

Crucially, the special status meant that Dr. Beck did not have to abide by the ethics agreement Mr. Trump adopted in January, which bars political appointees in his administration from participating for two years “in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.”

Her written offer of employment, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, also made it clear that Dr. Beck’s appointment was junior enough not to require Senate confirmation, which would have almost certainly delayed her arrival at the agency and prevented her from making changes to the rules ahead of the June deadline.

None of these arrangements raised concerns with the E.P.A.’s acting general counsel, Kevin S. Minoli, who issued a ruling on her unusual employment status. Mr. Minoli saw Dr. Beck’s background as a benefit, according to a memo he wrote that was reviewed by The Times.

“You have extensive prior experience with the regulated industry’s perspective and are already familiar with (and may well have authored) A.C.C. comments now under consideration,” he wrote, referring to the American Chemistry Council.

He added that Dr. Beck’s “unique expertise, knowledge and prior experience will ensure that the agency is able to consider all perspectives, including that of the regulated industry’s major trade association.”

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In a letter, an E.P.A. official addressed Dr. Beck’s ability to be involved in matters affecting her former employer.

Others at the E.P.A., however, were stunned at the free pass given to Dr. Beck.

“It was a clear demonstration this administration has been captured by the industry,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who served as the director of science and technology in the Office of Water until her retirement in July.

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Getting Her Way

In the weeks leading up to the June deadline, Dr. Beck made clear what changes she wanted.

The conversations were polite, and Dr. Beck listened to counterarguments that Ms. Hamnett and her team made, Ms. Hamnett said. But in most cases, Dr. Beck did not back down, demanding a variety of revisions, particularly related to how the agency defined risks.

It all had a familiar ring. Ms. Hamnett and the others had fielded many of the same demands from the American Chemistry Council and from Dr. Beck herself when she worked there. Ms. Hamnett took detailed notes in spiral notepads, excerpts from which she showed The Times.

One area of contention was Dr. Beck’s insistence that the E.P.A. adopt precise definitions of terms and phrases used in imposing rules and regulations, such as “best available science” and “weight of the evidence.”

The agency had repeatedly rejected the idea, most recently in January, in part because the definitions were seen as a guise for opponents to raise legal challenges.

“These terms have and will continue to evolve with changing scientific methods and innovation,” the agency said in a Jan. 17 statement in the Federal Register, three days before Mr. Trump was sworn in. “Codifying specific definitions for these phrases in this rule may inhibit the flexibility and responsiveness of the agency to quickly adapt to and implement changing science.”

Another area of dispute involved the “all uses” standard for evaluating health threats posed by chemicals. Under that standard, the E.P.A. would consider any possible use of a chemical when determining how to regulate it; Dr. Beck, like the chemical industry, wanted the E.P.A. to limit the evaluations to specific intended uses.

“There is no way we can look at thousands of uses,” Dr. Beck told Ms. Hamnett in one meeting in mid-May, according to Ms. Hamnett and her notes. “We can’t chase the last molecule.”

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Ms. Hamnett’s notes from meetings where changes in toxic chemical rules were discussed at the request of Dr. Beck, who had a history of second-guessing the E.P.A.’s scientists.

As the June deadline under the new law approached, Dr. Beck took control of the rewriting herself, a highly unusual step at the E.P.A., where expert Civil Service employees traditionally hold the rule-writing pen.

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Ms. Hamnett said she did not try to stop Dr. Beck given she had the support of the agency’s new leadership.

Mr. Noe, the lawyer who worked with Dr. Beck during the Bush administration, was not involved in the rewriting of the new rules. But he said it was wrong to interpret Dr. Beck’s actions as pro-industry; instead, he said, she was a defender of rigorous science.

“Anyone who would question Nancy’s ability or integrity does not know her at all and just has a political ax to grind,” he said.

Ms. Hamnett’s handwritten notes, however, record increasingly urgent objections from across the agency, including from the Waste and Chemical Enforcement Division, the Office of Water and the Office of General Counsel.

“Everyone was furious,” said Ms. Southerland, the official from the Office of Water. “Nancy was just rewriting the rule herself. And it was a huge change. Everybody was stunned such a substantial change would be made literally in the last week.”

The general counsel’s objections to the substance of the changes were among the most alarming.

Laurel Celeste, an agency lawyer, questioned whether the last-minute changes would leave the agency’s rule-making open to legal challenges. Her objections were outlined in a memo reviewed by The Times that was marked “confidential attorney client communication. Do not release under FOIA,” referring to the Freedom of Information Act.

Federal law requires rules to be a “logical outgrowth” of the administrative record. But Dr. Beck had demanded changes that the staff had rejected, meaning that the rule contained items that “differ so greatly from the proposal that they cannot be considered to be the ‘logical outgrowth’ of the proposal and the comments,” Ms. Celeste said.

Her memo, sent by email on May 30 to Dr. Beck and more than two dozen agency scientists and staff members, also raised concerns about the preamble, an important piece of any regulation that must accurately reflect its contents.

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“We are also concerned that, as currently drafted, the preamble lacks an adequate rationale for a number of final rule provisions that have changed significantly from the proposal,” Ms. Celeste wrote.

The objections were strongly worded, but they fell short of an important legal threshold — the formal filing of a “nonconcurrence” memo — that would have triggered further review of Dr. Beck’s actions. Several E.P.A. staff members said in interviews that they had been told by Mr. Pruitt’s top deputies to air their concerns in so-called concur-with-comment memos, which put objections on the record but allowed the process to move forward.

The rules, with Dr. Beck’s changes, were sent to the White House and approved by the June deadline. Mr. Pruitt assembled the team in late June for a brief ceremony to celebrate the completion of the work.

“Everybody here worked very, very hard,” Ms. Hamnett said, as Mr. Pruitt signed his name, according to a video of the ceremony posted by the E.P.A.

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Calvin M. Dooley, a former congressman who is president of the American Chemistry Council. In May, Dr. Beck, his recent employee, pushed through many industry-friendly changes at the E.P.A. Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

‘Not One of My Best Days’

Environmentalists were dismayed, but Ms. Hamnett emerged from the whirlwind process with some confidence that all was not lost.

While she disagreed with a number of Dr. Beck’s changes, she trusted that the E.P.A. staff would maintain its commitment to honor Congress’s intent in the 2016 legislation. That would translate into a rigorous crackdown on the most dangerous chemicals, regardless of the changes.

But her confidence in the E.P.A.’s resolve was fragile, and it had been shaken by other actions, including the order Ms. Hamnett received to reverse course on banning the pesticide chlorpyrifos.

The order came before Dr. Beck’s arrival at the agency, but Ms. Hamnett saw the industry’s fingerprints all over it. Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, instructed Ms. Hamnett to ignore the recommendation of agency scientists, she said.

The scientists had called for a ban based on research suggesting the pesticide might cause developmental disabilities in children.

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Farm workers in a field picking berries. Chlorpyrifos, a pesticide blamed for developmental disabilities in children, is still widely used in agriculture. In March, Mr. Pruitt overrode agency scientists’ recommendation to ban it. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

To keep the pesticide on the market, under E.P.A. guidelines, the agency needed to have a “reasonable certainty” that no harm was being caused.

“The science and the law tell us this is the way to go,” Ms. Hamnett said of a ban.

But the reaction from her superiors was not about the science or the law, she said. Instead, they queried her about Dow Chemical, the pesticide’s largest manufacturer, which had been lobbying against a ban.

The clash is recorded in Ms. Hamnett notebook as well as in emails among Mr. Pruitt’s top political aides, which were obtained by The Times.

“They are trying to strong arm us,” Mr. Jackson wrote after meeting with Ms. Hamnett, who presented him with a draft petition to ban the pesticide.

Mr. Jackson, Ms. Hamnett’s notebook shows, then asked her to come up with alternatives to a ban. He asserted, her notes show, that he did not want to be “forced into a box” by the petition.

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Ms. Hamnett recorded Mr. Jackson’s reaction to a pesticide ban in her notebook.

“I scared them,” Mr. Jackson wrote in an email to a colleague about his demands on Ms. Hamnett and her team.

As a possible compromise, Ms. Hamnett’s team had been talking to Dow about perhaps phasing out the pesticide instead of imposing an immediate ban. But Dow, after Mr. Trump’s election, was suddenly in no mood to compromise, Ms. Hamnett recalled. Dow did not respond to requests for comment.

She now knew, she said, that the effort to ban the pesticide had been lost, something Mr. Jackson’s emails celebrated.

“They know where this is headed,” Mr. Jackson wrote.

Just over a week later, Ms. Hamnett submitted a draft order that would deny the request for a ban.

“It was hard, very hard,” she said, worrying that the pesticide would continue to harm children of farmworkers. “That was not one of my best days.”

The episode is one reason she worries the E.P.A. will defer to the chemical industry as it begins to evaluate toxic chemicals under the standards created by the new law. She became particularly concerned because of a more recent exchange with Dr. Beck over methylene chloride, which is used in paint removers.

After more than a decade of research, the agency had concluded in January that methylene chloride was so hazardous that its use in paint removers should be banned.

Methylene chloride has been blamed in dozens of deaths, including that of a 21-year-old Tennessee man in April, who was overwhelmed by fumes as he was refinishing a bathtub.

“How is it possible that you can go to a home improvement store and buy a paint remover that can kill you?” Ms. Hamnett asked. “How can we let this happen?”

Furniture-refinishing companies and chemical manufacturers have urged the E.P.A. to focus on steps like strengthening warning labels, complaining that there are few reasonably priced alternatives.

Ms. Hamnett said Dr. Beck raised the possibility that people were not following the directions on the labels. She also suggested that only a small number of users had been injured. “Is it 1 percent?” Ms. Hamnett recalled Dr. Beck asking.

Ms. Hamnett said she was devastated by the line of questioning.

After years of successfully fending off Dr. Beck and her industry allies, the balance of power at the agency had shifted toward the industry.

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A postcard received by Ms. Hamnett during the early months of the Trump administration, urging her to stay the course. The sender’s information has been redacted by The New York Times.

She had long planned to wrap up her work at the agency soon, as her husband, David, had retired three years ago. On Sept. 1, Ms. Hamnett turned in her badge and joined him.

Mr. Pruitt has selected a replacement for Ms. Hamnett: Michael L. Dourson, a toxicologist who has spent the last two decades as a consultant helping businesses fight E.P.A. restrictions on the use of potentially toxic compounds. He is already at work at the agency in a temporary post while he awaits Senate confirmation.

The American Chemistry Council, and its members, are among the top private-sector sponsors of Mr. Dourson’s research. Last year, he collaborated on a paper that was funded by the trade group. His fellow author was Dr. Beck.

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I-Drive 360 Part One: SEALIFE

New Post has been published on https://twentysomethinginorlando.com/drive-360-part-one-sealife/

I-Drive 360 Part One: SEALIFE

At this point I think pretty much everyone in the city is aware of the Orlando Eye, err the Coca-Cola Orlando Eye. Proper nomenclature and all that. It’s hard to miss as it towers over International Drive. What most people might not know is it’s not the only attraction there. The building also houses two more main attractions: the SEALIFE Aquarium Orlando and Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. There are also numerous restaurants and other attractions just outside the building within the complex, like Skeletons: Museum of Osteology, but we are focusing on the inside of the building, known as I-Drive: 360. You can buy a ticket to just one attraction, two attractions, or all three. Like most things in Orlando, the more you buy, the better the value.

My friend Lacey and I were going to do all three late one Wednesday morning; I was running late but had Duffy in tow. She had been to a Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas and had ridden the London Eye, but never been to the ones here. I think she was more excited than I was after I told her I would be writing about our adventure for the blog. (I hadn’t told her about it yet.)

The lobby isn’t overly large, but it has a food court with four or five counter service stations and some tables and chairs. There’s a bathroom in one corner. The SEALIFE Aquarium is to your right, Madame Tussauds is on the left and the Orlando Eye is straight ahead. Each one has its own ticket counter and two lines: one for people who already have tickets and those who need to purchase them.

Cue the Jaws theme.

We started with the SEALIFE Aquarium. There’s a vast shift in lighting as you head in: it gets dark and hard to see quickly. They stopped us for pictures in front of a green screen, and the next room seemed to be a holding area for a preshow. There was a screen with a counter going down, but the guy just gave us the safety briefing and opened the door instead of having us wait. It led into a circular room surrounded by fish in tanks that swam in one direction around you. The ceiling is a movie so it appears that you just stepped underwater, and there was a group of sharks discussing whether are not they like to eat humans. (With Australian accents.) Maybe it would have made more sense if we had come in at the beginning. Then three more characters swam in from off screen and started telling us again in Australian accents that our tour begins this way. I guess after Finding Nemo people expect sharks to sound like they’re from Down Under.

The first exhibit you come to is a series of Ocean Caves. They’re smaller tanks with lion fish and similar creatures with pop ups in the middle so you can crawl under the tank to stand up and be surrounded by fish. We were disappointed they didn’t come in our size. There was a half-moon shaped exhibit where you could experience the almost same effect if you were over three feet tall. Then there was a wall of jellyfish and you move into a shipwreck themed area dedicated to sharks. There’s a wall of touch screens where you can learn about sharks… and for some reason manta rays. Is a manta ray a type of shark and no one told me?

Most of the SEALIFE aquarium is one massive tank in the center that you make your way around and has multiple viewing spots and then lots of smaller tanks around the outside. I counted several different sharks in the big tank and at least two sea turtles. There were also divers in there working on cleaning something but I couldn’t tell what.

That is a shark under my foot.

The coral reef section was the most impressive and actually had adult sized viewing spots where you could go beneath the tank to look up at the fish. The colors were bright and beautiful, and it makes me even sadder the Great Barrier Reef is now dead. From there you head into the 360º viewing tunnel, which is the only one in Orlando. You stand with glass under your feet and all around you as you watch the fish swim by. It took a little bit of waiting but I had a shark swim underneath me! Something that I certainly hope never happens again, unless I go back or am somewhere else where it’s nice and safe and there’s something between me and the shark. He was only about three or four feet long, pretty average size for a black tip reef shark… with twelve rows of teeth.

Ted the sea turtle.

We continued onto the next set of exhibits. We passed the cute little seahorses and saw our second of the two sea turtles housed there, a massive rescue named Ted. There was a pool of sting rays that were extremely friendly and went back and forth in front of us several times. The next room is dedicated to the Florida Everglades, something that I assume is probably unique to this SEALIFE Aquarium. There are several varieties of turtles and fish. The next room is a kids’ play area and the final area is a touch pool with star fish and sea anemones, and I had flash backs to Finding Dory this time. It ends incredibly abruptly, I had no idea that was going to be the last exhibit. You enter a gift shop where they show you the photos you had taken earlier in a photo album, already printed, and try to get you to buy it. I guess seeing it printed is supposed to entice you to buy it, but all I could think was “Well, you already wasted the ink and paper.” So we headed on out and across the lobby.

I spent quite a bit of time debating if this should be one Adventure Report or three separate ones. Check back for the posts on Madame Tussauds and the Orlando Eye itself.

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TRUMP RULES: Why Is the E.P.A. Soft on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Gets Her Way

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/trump-rules-why-is-the-e-p-a-soft-on-toxic-chemicals-an-industry-insider-gets-her-way/

TRUMP RULES: Why Is the E.P.A. Soft on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Gets Her Way

The changes directed by Dr. Beck may result in an “underestimation of the potential risks to human health and the environment” caused by PFOA and other so-called legacy chemicals no longer sold on the market, the Office of Water’s top official warned in a confidential internal memo obtained by The New York Times.

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Dr. Beck testifying at a Senate hearing in March. She joined the E.P.A. in May after working as an executive at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main trade association. Credit U.S. Senate Committee Channel

The E.P.A.’s abrupt new direction on legacy chemicals is part of a broad initiative by the Trump administration to change the way the federal government evaluates health and environmental risks associated with hazardous chemicals, making it more aligned with the industry’s wishes.

It is a cause with far-reaching consequences for consumers and chemical companies, as the E.P.A. regulates some 80,000 different chemicals, many of them highly toxic and used in workplaces, homes and everyday products. If chemicals are deemed less risky, they are less likely to be subjected to heavy oversight and restrictions.

The effort is not new, nor is the decades-long debate over how best to identify and assess risks, but the industry has not benefited from such highly placed champions in government since the Reagan administration. The cause was taken up by Dr. Beck and others in the administration of President George W. Bush, with some success, and met with resistance during the Obama administration. Now it has been aggressively revived under President Trump by an array of industry-backed political appointees and others.

Dr. Beck, who has a doctorate in environmental health, comes from a camp — firmly backed by the chemical industry — that says the government too often directs burdensome rules at what she has called “phantom risks.”

Other scientists and administrators at the E.P.A., including Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, until last month the agency’s top official overseeing pesticides and toxic chemicals, say the dangers are real and the pushback is often a tactic for deflecting accountability — and shoring up industry profits at the expense of public safety.

Document

E.P.A.’s Decision Not to Ban Chlorpyrifos

The New York Times requested copies of email correspondence related to the March 2017 decision by the E.P.A. to reject a decade-old petition to ban chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide that research suggests may cause developmental delays in children exposed to it in drinking water or in farming communities. Here are those documents.

OPEN Document

Since Mr. Trump’s election, Dr. Beck’s approach has been unabashedly ascendant, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former E.P.A. and White House officials, confidential E.P.A. documents, and materials obtained through open-record requests.

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In March, Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. chief, overrode the recommendation of Ms. Hamnett and agency scientists to ban the commercial use of the pesticide chlorpyrifos, blamed for developmental disabilities in children.

The E.P.A.’s new leadership also pressed agency scientists to re-evaluate a plan to ban certain uses of two dangerous chemicals that have caused dozens of deaths or severe health problems: methylene chloride, which is found in paint strippers, and trichloroethylene, which removes grease from metals and is used in dry cleaning.

“It was extremely disturbing to me,” Ms. Hamnett said of the order she received to reverse the proposed pesticide ban. “The industry met with E.P.A. political appointees. And then I was asked to change the agency’s stand.”

The E.P.A. and Dr. Beck declined repeated requests to comment that included detailed lists of questions.

“No matter how much information we give you, you would never write a fair piece,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., said in an email. “The only thing inappropriate and biased is your continued fixation on writing elitist clickbait trying to attack qualified professionals committed to serving their country.”

Before joining the E.P.A., Ms. Bowman was a spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council.

The conflict over how to define risk in federal regulations comes just as the E.P.A. was supposed to be fixing its backlogged and beleaguered chemical regulation program. Last year, after a decade of delays, Congress passed bipartisan legislation that would push the E.P.A. to determine whether dozens of chemicals were so dangerous that they should be banned or restricted.

The chemical safety law was passed after Congress and the chemical industry reached a consensus that toxic chemical threats — or at least the fear of them — were so severe that they undermined consumer confidence in products on the market.

But now the chemical industry and many of the companies that use their compounds are praising the Trump administration’s changed direction, saying new chemicals are getting faster regulatory reviews and existing chemicals will benefit from a less dogmatic approach to determining risk.

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“U.S. businesses, jobs and competitiveness depend on a functioning new chemicals program,” Calvin M. Dooley, a former congressman who is president of the American Chemistry Council, said in a statement. It was issued in June after Dr. Beck, his recent employee, pushed through many industry-friendly changes in her new role at the E.P.A., including the change in tracking legacy chemicals such as PFOA.

Anne Womack Kolton, a vice president at the council, said on Wednesday that Dr. Beck’s appointment was a positive development.

“We, along with many others, are glad that individuals who support credible science and thorough analysis as the basis for policymaking have agreed to serve,” she said in an email. “Consistency, transparency and high quality science in the regulatory process are in everyone’s interests.”

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Calvin M. Dooley, a former congressman who is president of the American Chemistry Council. In May, Dr. Beck, his recent employee, pushed through many industry-friendly changes at the E.P.A. Credit Jabin Botsford/The New York Times

The Trump administration’s shift, the industry has acknowledged, could have financial benefits. Otherwise, the industry may lose “millions of dollars and years of research invested in a chemical,” the American Chemistry Council and other groups wrote in a legal brief defending the changes Dr. Beck had engineered.

But consumer advocates and many longtime scientists, managers and administrators at the E.P.A. are alarmed by the administration’s priorities and worry that the new law’s anticipated crackdown on hazardous chemicals could be compromised.

“You are never going to have 100 percent certainty on anything,” Ms. Hamnett said. “But when you have a chemical that evidence points to is causing fatalities, you err more on the side of taking some action, as opposed to ‘Let’s wait and spend some more time and try to get the science entirely certain,’ which it hardly ever gets to be.”

The divergent approaches and yearslong face-off between Ms. Hamnett and Dr. Beck parallel the story of the chemical industry’s quest to keep the E.P.A.’s enforcement arm at bay.

The two women, one a lawyer from New Jersey, the other a scientist from Long Island, have dedicated their lives to the issue of hazardous chemicals. Each’s expertise is respected by her peers, but their perspectives couldn’t be more dissimilar.

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Ms. Hamnett, 63, spent her entire 38-year career at the E.P.A., joining the agency directly from law school as a believer in consumer and environmental protections. Dr. Beck, 51, did a fellowship at the E.P.A., but has spent most of her 29-year career elsewhere: in a testing lab at Estée Lauder, as a toxicologist in the Washington State Health Department, as a regulatory analyst in the White House and most recently with the chemical industry’s trade group.

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Ms. Hamnett in Falls Church, Va. Last month, she retired as the top official overseeing pesticides and toxic chemicals at the E.P.A. “I had become irrelevant,” she said about changes there under the Trump administration. Credit Jared Soares for The New York Times

Before Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Hamnett would have been regarded as the hands-down victor in their professional tug of war. Her decision to retire in September amounted to a surrender of sorts, a powerful acknowledgment of the two women’s reversed fortunes under the Trump administration.

“I had become irrelevant,” Ms. Hamnett said.

Her farewell party in late August was held in the wood-paneled Map Room on the first floor of the E.P.A. headquarters, the same room where Mr. Trump had signed an executive order backed by big business that called for the agency to dismantle environmental protections.

Dr. Beck was among those who spoke. She thanked Ms. Hamnett for her decades of service. “I don’t know what I am going to do without her,” she said, according to multiple people who attended the event.

Ms. Hamnett, in an interview, said she had little trouble envisioning the future under the new leadership. “It’s time for me to go,” she said. “I have done what I could do.”

‘Unreasonable Risk of Injury’

Chemical regulation was not part of the E.P.A.’s original mission. But several environmental disasters in the early 1970s prompted Congress to extend the agency’s authority.

Industrial waste, including highly toxic PCBs, led to fish kills in the Hudson River. Chemicals from flame retardants were detected in livestock in Michigan, contaminating food across the state. And residents in Niagara Falls, N.Y., first started to notice a black, oily liquid in their basements, early hints of one of the worst environmental disasters in United States history: Love Canal.

President Gerald R. Ford signed the Toxic Substances Control Act in October 1976, giving the E.P.A. the authority to ban or restrict chemicals it deemed dangerous. It was hailed as a public health breakthrough.

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“For the first time, the law empowers the federal government to control and even to stop production or use of chemical substances that may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or environment,” a federal report said.

A few years later, after graduating from George Washington University Law School in 1979, Ms. Hamnett landed at the E.P.A. She arrived fully embracing its enhanced mission.

She had grown up in Trenton, where the words “Trenton Makes, the World Takes” are affixed in neon to the side of a railroad bridge spanning the Delaware River.

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A bridge over the Delaware River in Trenton, N.J., says, “Trenton Makes, the World Takes.” The Roebling Steel Company plant brought prosperity to the region, but also contaminated soil and groundwater with hazardous chemicals. Credit Mel Evans/Associated Press

Her childhood memories included passing by the 200-acre Roebling Steel Company plant — named after the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge. At its peak, the plant was Trenton’s largest employer, and it helped spread prosperity to the region.

But the company was also a chronic polluter. For decades, it dumped arsenic, chromium, lead and other hazardous chemicals, contaminating soil and groundwater. Ultimately, the pollution was so pervasive that the E.P.A. declared the property a Superfund cleanup site.

It was this legacy, as well as the congressional directive to the E.P.A. to protect the public from harm, that Ms. Hamnett said guided her.

During the Bush administration, she was drawn into a contentious debate involving lead paint that highlighted her resolve — and that of her opponents.

Few environmental hazards are as well understood as the dangers of lead in paint. Since it was first used in homes in the United States, more than a century ago, it has poisoned children. Even after it was banned in the late 1970s, it remained a threat, particularly when renovations took place in the tens of millions of homes with lead-based paint.

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The E.P.A. set out to establish standards governing home renovations, and Ms. Hamnett came to the discussions with a strong perspective.

“What is the effect of exposure likely to be?” she recalled asking. “If it is likely to be a severe effect and result in a significant number of people exposed, if so, I am going to err on the side of safety.”

While the evidence was solid that lead caused learning disabilities and other problems for children, it was less definitive on whether it was also a factor in adult diseases.

To Ms. Hamnett and her colleagues, the results of multiple studies were compelling enough to establish an apparent link to cardiovascular disease in adults. They concluded in a report in 2006 that there was “stronger evidence for a relationship between lead exposure and blood pressure for adults,” citing it as a factor for aggressive safety requirements.

The home renovation industry filed protests over the “inappropriate and costly” rule with the Bush administration and Congress. Taking up its cause was a White House official with a reputation for assessing risk much differently: Dr. Beck.

Throwing ‘Sand in the Gears’

As the Bush administration took office, John D. Graham, who ran the White House office overseeing regulations, unveiled a plan to ease the government’s burden on business by reining in “the regulatory state.”

To that end, Mr. Graham hired scientists to review major federal regulations and make recommendations about their worthiness, something the E.P.A. itself had done over the years.

Dr. Beck, Mr. Graham said, was an excellent addition to his staff.

She had grown up in Oyster Bay, N.Y., an affluent suburb on Long Island, earned an undergraduate microbiology degree in 1988 from Cornell and a doctorate from the University of Washington a decade later. Her dissertation, which examined how the sedative phenobarbital impacts the metabolism of the liver, started with words still relevant to her today: “Each day the human body is confronted with many potentially toxic substances in the form of food items, medicinal products and environmental agents.”

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She started her career at Estée Lauder, where she helped develop preservatives used to extend the shelf life of cosmetics, and also designed laboratory tests to determine if products caused adverse reactions when applied to skin.

When Mr. Graham hired her, she had been working as a science fellow at the E.P.A.’s center for environmental reviews. He described her as having “street smarts and thick skin,” someone who did not need the limelight to be effective.

“Dr. Beck is easy to underestimate,” Mr. Graham said in an email.

When the proposed lead paint rule came along in 2006, Dr. Beck, in her White House role, pressed Ms. Hamnett and others in the E.P.A. to revise the language to diminish the link to cardiovascular disease in adults, Ms. Hamnett recalled, before letting the rule go into effect.

That was one marker in Dr. Beck’s journey to redefine the way the government evaluates risk. Though they repeatedly found themselves on opposite sides, Ms. Hamnett said that, in a way, she admired Dr. Beck’s effort during those years.

She described Dr. Beck as a voracious reader of scientific studies and agency reports, diving deep into footnotes and scientific data with a rigor matched by few colleagues. She combed through thousands of comments submitted on proposed rules. And she had a habit of reading the Federal Register, the daily diary of new federal rules.

All of it made Dr. Beck an intimidating and confident adversary, Ms. Hamnett recalled. “She’s very smart and very well informed,” she said.

But there was a destructive side to that confidence, others said. In particular, Dr. Beck was seen as an enemy of scientists and risk assessors at the E.P.A., willing to challenge the validity of their studies and impose her own judgment, said Robert M. Sussman, a lawyer who represented chemical industry clients during the Bush administration and later became an E.P.A. lawyer and policy adviser under the Obama administration.

“Her goal was to throw sand in the gears to stop things from going forward,” said Mr. Sussman, who now is counsel to Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, a coalition of consumer and environmental groups.

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Jack Housenger, a biologist who served as the director of the E.P.A.’s pesticide program, had a more positive recollection. He said Dr. Beck asked reasonable questions about his findings related to a wood preservative used in playgrounds and outdoor decks that was being pulled from the market.

“She wanted us to present the uncertainties and ranges of risk,” said Mr. Housenger, who retired this year. “She was trying to understand the methodology.”

Paul Noe, a lawyer who worked with Dr. Beck during the Bush administration, also said her critics got her wrong.

“What you really want to do as a government is to set priorities,” he said. “If you don’t have a realistic way of distinguishing significant risks from insignificant ones, you are just going to get bogged down and waste significant resources, and that can impede public health and safety.”

One of the harshest criticisms of Dr. Beck’s tenure in the Bush White House came in 2007 from the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences, which examined a draft policy she helped write proposing much stricter controls over the way the government evaluates risks.

“The committee agrees that there is room for improvement in risk assessment practices in the federal government,” the review said, but it described Dr. Beck’s suggestions as “oversimplified” and “fundamentally flawed.” It recommended her proposal be withdrawn.

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E.P.A. and Toxic Chemical Rules

An internal struggle has broken out in the Environmental Protection Agency over how to regulate toxic chemicals. These documents tell the backstory of the tension, which emerged after the Trump administration named an industry insider as a top agency regulator.

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Dr. Beck was so aggressive in second-guessing E.P.A. scientists that she became central to a special investigation by the House Committee on Science and Technology.

The committee obtained copies of her detailed emails to agency officials and accused her of slowing progress in confirming drinking-water health threats presented by chemicals like perchlorate, used in rocket fuel. “Suppression of Environmental Science by the Bush Administration’s Office of Management and Budget,” the committee wrote in 2009, before describing Dr. Beck’s actions.

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The opposition became so intense that Dr. Beck’s efforts started to get shut down.

First, the new risk assessment policy she had proposed was formally withdrawn. Then, after Mr. Obama took office in 2009, Mr. Sussman recalled going to the White House along with Lisa P. Jackson, the new E.P.A. administrator, to ask for a commitment to curb Dr. Beck’s power.

“We told them that we need the White House out of the E.P.A. science program,” Mr. Sussman said. “We demanded that. And we got it.”

Continuing the Fight

During Mr. Obama’s first term, Dr. Beck left the White House for the American Chemistry Council, whose members include Dow, DuPont and dozens of other major manufacturers and chemical companies.

As the trade association’s senior regulatory scientist, she was perfectly positioned to continue her second-guessing of the E.P.A.’s science.

Now her detailed criticisms of the agency came on trade association letterhead and in presentations at agency meetings and events.

“If the same person says the same thing three times, does this create a weight of evidence?” Dr. Beck said in a presentation in 2013, essentially mocking the scientific standards at the agency.

E.P.A. records show her challenging the agency’s scientific conclusions related to arsenic (used to manufacture semiconductors), tert-Butanol (used in perfumes and as an octane booster in gasoline), and 1-bromopropane (used in dry cleaning).

Her point was often the same: Did the scientists producing work that federal regulators relied on adequately justify all of the conclusions about any risks?

“Scientists today are more prolific than ever,” she said in a November 2014 presentation, later adding that “unfortunately, many of the scientific studies we read about in the news were not quite ready for prime time.”

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But at the same time, the industry was confronting a much larger existential problem.

E.P.A. and government-funded academic researchers were raising serious health questions about the safety of a range of chemicals, including flame retardants in furniture and plastics in water bottles and children’s toys. Consumer confidence in the industry was eroding.

Some state legislatures, frustrated by the E.P.A.’s slow response and facing a consumer backlash, moved to increase their own authority to investigate and act on the problems — threatening the chemical industry with an unwieldy patchwork of state rules and regulations.

Dr. Beck and other chemical industry representatives were dispatched to the E.P.A. and Congress to press for changes to the federal regulatory system that would standardize testing of the most worrisome existing chemicals and improve and accelerate the evaluation of new ones.

The resulting law, passed last year with Democratic and Republican support, gave both sides something they wanted. The chemical industry got pre-emption from most new state regulations, and environmentalists got assurances that new chemicals would be evaluated on health and safety risks alone, not financial considerations.

It was the most significant overhaul of the Toxic Substances Control Act since its enactment in the 1970s, and once again Ms. Hamnett was prepared to help shepherd it into place. The task was shaping up to be what she considered her final, crowning act at the E.P.A.

Ms. Hamnett was invited to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a part of the White House complex, to be present as Mr. Obama signed the bill into law. She was so excited that she arrived early and sneaked up to the stage to look at the papers Mr. Obama would be signing.

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President Barack Obama signing a chemical safety bill in June last year. Credit Zach Gibson for The New York Times

“Protecting people and the environment for decades to come,” she said, recalling her thoughts, as she excitedly stood on the stage. “At least, that is what we planned.”

Turning the Tables

They gathered in early June around a long conference table at the E.P.A. headquarters, the sunlight shining in from Constitution Avenue. In the crowd were Dr. Beck, Ms. Hamnett and other top agency officials charged with regulating toxic chemicals, as well as environmentalists worried about last-minute changes to rules being pushed by the chemical industry.

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Olga Naidenko, an immunologist specializing in children’s health, said she was struck by the head-spinning scene. Dr. Beck, who had spent years trying to influence Ms. Hamnett and others to issue rules friendly to the chemical industry, was now sitting at the conference table as a government decision maker.

“I am running the show. I am now in the chair. And it is mine,” Dr. Naidenko, said, describing her impressions of Dr. Beck at the gathering.

The Obama-era leadership at the E.P.A., in its last weeks, had published drafts of two critical rules needed to start the new chemical program. The rules detailed how the agency would choose the most risky chemicals to be tested or evaluated and how the hazards should be judged.

It would be up to Mr. Pruitt, the new E.P.A. chief, and his team to complete the process in time for a June deadline, set in the legislation.

Dr. Naidenko, a staff scientist at the Environmental Working Group, was there to plead with the agency to ignore a request from the American Chemistry Council to make more than a dozen last-minute changes, some pushed by Dr. Beck while she was at the council.

Dr. Beck did not seem convinced, recalled Dr. Naidenko and one of her colleagues, Melanie Benesh, a lawyer with the same organization.

“Tell me why you are concerned. What is it about?” Ms. Benesh and Ms. Hamnett each said they recalled Dr. Beck saying.

In fact, behind the scenes, the deed was already done.

Before Dr. Beck’s arrival, representatives from the E.P.A.’s major divisions had agreed on final wording for the rules that would be sent to the White House for approval. But they were told to wait until May 1, when Dr. Beck began her job as the acting assistant administrator for chemical safety.

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Dr. Beck then spent her first weeks on the job pressing agency staff to rewrite the standards to reflect, in some cases, word for word, the chemical industry’s proposed changes, three staff members involved in the effort said. They asked not to be named for fear of losing their jobs.

Dr. Beck had unusual authority to make it happen.

When she was hired by the Trump administration, she was granted the status of “administratively determined” position. It is an unusual classification that means she was not hired based on a competitive process — as civil servants are — and she was also not identified as a political appointee. There are only about a dozen such posts at the E.P.A., among the 15,800 agency employees, and the jobs are typically reserved for technical experts, not managers with the authority to give orders.

Crucially, the special status meant that Dr. Beck did not have to abide by the ethics agreement Mr. Trump adopted in January, which bars political appointees in his administration from participating for two years “in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.”

Her written offer of employment, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, also made it clear that Dr. Beck’s appointment was junior enough not to require Senate confirmation, which would have almost certainly delayed her arrival at the agency and prevented her from making changes to the rules ahead of the June deadline.

None of these arrangements raised concerns with the E.P.A.’s acting general counsel, Kevin S. Minoli, who issued a ruling on her unusual employment status. Mr. Minoli saw Dr. Beck’s background as a benefit, according to a memo he wrote that was reviewed by The Times.

“You have extensive prior experience with the regulated industry’s perspective and are already familiar with (and may well have authored) A.C.C. comments now under consideration,” he wrote, referring to the American Chemistry Council.

He added that Dr. Beck’s “unique expertise, knowledge and prior experience will ensure that the agency is able to consider all perspectives, including that of the regulated industry’s major trade association.”

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In a letter, an E.P.A. official addressed Dr. Beck’s ability to be involved in matters affecting her former employer.

Others at the E.P.A., however, were stunned at the free pass given to Dr. Beck.

“It was a clear demonstration this administration has been captured by the industry,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who served as the director of science and technology in the Office of Water until her retirement in July.

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Getting Her Way

In the weeks leading up to the June deadline, Dr. Beck made clear what changes she wanted.

The conversations were polite, and Dr. Beck listened to counterarguments that Ms. Hamnett and her team made, Ms. Hamnett said. But in most cases, Dr. Beck did not back down, demanding a variety of revisions, particularly related to how the agency defined risks.

It all had a familiar ring. Ms. Hamnett and the others had fielded many of the same demands from the American Chemistry Council and from Dr. Beck herself when she worked there. Ms. Hamnett took detailed notes in spiral notepads, excerpts from which she showed The Times.

One area of contention was Dr. Beck’s insistence that the E.P.A. adopt precise definitions of terms and phrases used in imposing rules and regulations, such as “best available science” and “weight of the evidence.”

The agency had repeatedly rejected the idea, most recently in January, in part because the definitions were seen as a guise for opponents to raise legal challenges.

“These terms have and will continue to evolve with changing scientific methods and innovation,” the agency said in a Jan. 17 statement in the Federal Register, three days before Mr. Trump was sworn in. “Codifying specific definitions for these phrases in this rule may inhibit the flexibility and responsiveness of the agency to quickly adapt to and implement changing science.”

Another area of dispute involved the “all uses” standard for evaluating health threats posed by chemicals. Under that standard, the E.P.A. would consider any possible use of a chemical when determining how to regulate it; Dr. Beck, like the chemical industry, wanted the E.P.A. to limit the evaluations to specific intended uses.

“There is no way we can look at thousands of uses,” Dr. Beck told Ms. Hamnett in one meeting in mid-May, according to Ms. Hamnett and her notes. “We can’t chase the last molecule.”

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Ms. Hamnett’s notes from meetings where changes in toxic chemical rules were discussed at the request of Dr. Beck, who had a history of second-guessing the E.P.A.’s scientists.

As the June deadline under the new law approached, Dr. Beck took control of the rewriting herself, a highly unusual step at the E.P.A., where expert Civil Service employees traditionally hold the rule-writing pen.

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Ms. Hamnett said she did not try to stop Dr. Beck given she had the support of the agency’s new leadership.

Mr. Noe, the lawyer who worked with Dr. Beck during the Bush administration, was not involved in the rewriting of the new rules. But he said it was wrong to interpret Dr. Beck’s actions as pro-industry; instead, he said, she was a defender of rigorous science.

“Anyone who would question Nancy’s ability or integrity does not know her at all and just has a political ax to grind,” he said.

Ms. Hamnett’s handwritten notes, however, record increasingly urgent objections from across the agency, including from the Waste and Chemical Enforcement Division, the Office of Water and the Office of General Counsel.

“Everyone was furious,” said Ms. Southerland, the official from the Office of Water. “Nancy was just rewriting the rule herself. And it was a huge change. Everybody was stunned such a substantial change would be made literally in the last week.”

The general counsel’s objections to the substance of the changes were among the most alarming.

Laurel Celeste, an agency lawyer, questioned whether the last-minute changes would leave the agency’s rule-making open to legal challenges. Her objections were outlined in a memo reviewed by The Times that was marked “confidential attorney client communication. Do not release under FOIA,” referring to the Freedom of Information Act.

Federal law requires rules to be a “logical outgrowth” of the administrative record. But Dr. Beck had demanded changes that the staff had rejected, meaning that the rule contained items that “differ so greatly from the proposal that they cannot be considered to be the ‘logical outgrowth’ of the proposal and the comments,” Ms. Celeste said.

Her memo, sent by email on May 30 to Dr. Beck and more than two dozen agency scientists and staff members, also raised concerns about the preamble, an important piece of any regulation that must accurately reflect its contents.

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“We are also concerned that, as currently drafted, the preamble lacks an adequate rationale for a number of final rule provisions that have changed significantly from the proposal,” Ms. Celeste wrote.

The objections were strongly worded, but they fell short of an important legal threshold — the formal filing of a “nonconcurrence” memo — that would have triggered further review of Dr. Beck’s actions. Several E.P.A. staff members said in interviews that they had been told by Mr. Pruitt’s top deputies to air their concerns in so-called concur-with-comment memos, which put objections on the record but allowed the process to move forward.

The rules, with Dr. Beck’s changes, were sent to the White House and approved by the June deadline. Mr. Pruitt assembled the team in late June for a brief ceremony to celebrate the completion of the work.

“Everybody here worked very, very hard,” Ms. Hamnett said, as Mr. Pruitt signed his name, according to a video of the ceremony posted by the E.P.A.

Dr. Beck, left, and Ms. Hamnett, center, who clashed over changes to new toxic chemical rules, attended a signing ceremony with Mr. Pruitt. Video by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

‘Not One of My Best Days’

Environmentalists were dismayed, but Ms. Hamnett emerged from the whirlwind process with some confidence that all was not lost.

While she disagreed with a number of Dr. Beck’s changes, she trusted that the E.P.A. staff would maintain its commitment to honor Congress’s intent in the 2016 legislation. That would translate into a rigorous crackdown on the most dangerous chemicals, regardless of the changes.

But her confidence in the E.P.A.’s resolve was fragile, and it had been shaken by other actions, including the order Ms. Hamnett received to reverse course on banning the pesticide chlorpyrifos.

The order came before Dr. Beck’s arrival at the agency, but Ms. Hamnett saw the industry’s fingerprints all over it. Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, instructed Ms. Hamnett to ignore the recommendation of agency scientists, she said.

The scientists had called for a ban based on research suggesting the pesticide might cause developmental disabilities in children.

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Farm workers in a field picking berries. Chlorpyrifos, a pesticide blamed for developmental disabilities in children, is still widely used in agriculture. In March, Mr. Pruitt overrode agency scientists’ recommendation to ban it. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

To keep the pesticide on the market, under E.P.A. guidelines, the agency needed to have a “reasonable certainty” that no harm was being caused.

“The science and the law tell us this is the way to go,” Ms. Hamnett said of a ban.

But the reaction from her superiors was not about the science or the law, she said. Instead, they queried her about Dow Chemical, the pesticide’s largest manufacturer, which had been lobbying against a ban.

The clash is recorded in Ms. Hamnett notebook as well as in emails among Mr. Pruitt’s top political aides, which were obtained by The Times.

“They are trying to strong arm us,” Mr. Jackson wrote after meeting with Ms. Hamnett, who presented him with a draft petition to ban the pesticide.

Mr. Jackson, Ms. Hamnett’s notebook shows, then asked her to come up with alternatives to a ban. He asserted, her notes show, that he did not want to be “forced into a box” by the petition.

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Ms. Hamnett recorded Mr. Jackson’s reaction to a pesticide ban in her notebook.

“I scared them,” Mr. Jackson wrote in an email to a colleague about his demands on Ms. Hamnett and her team.

As a possible compromise, Ms. Hamnett’s team had been talking to Dow about perhaps phasing out the pesticide instead of imposing an immediate ban. But Dow, after Mr. Trump’s election, was suddenly in no mood to compromise, Ms. Hamnett recalled. Dow did not respond to requests for comment.

She now knew, she said, that the effort to ban the pesticide had been lost, something Mr. Jackson’s emails celebrated.

“They know where this is headed,” Mr. Jackson wrote.

Just over a week later, Ms. Hamnett submitted a draft order that would deny the request for a ban.

“It was hard, very hard,” she said, worrying that the pesticide would continue to harm children of farmworkers. “That was not one of my best days.”

The episode is one reason she worries the E.P.A. will defer to the chemical industry as it begins to evaluate toxic chemicals under the standards created by the new law. She became particularly concerned because of a more recent exchange with Dr. Beck over methylene chloride, which is used in paint removers.

After more than a decade of research, the agency had concluded in January that methylene chloride was so hazardous that its use in paint removers should be banned.

Methylene chloride has been blamed in dozens of deaths, including that of a 21-year-old Tennessee man in April, who was overwhelmed by fumes as he was refinishing a bathtub.

“How is it possible that you can go to a home improvement store and buy a paint remover that can kill you?” Ms. Hamnett asked. “How can we let this happen?”

Furniture-refinishing companies and chemical manufacturers have urged the E.P.A. to focus on steps like strengthening warning labels, complaining that there are few reasonably priced alternatives.

Ms. Hamnett said Dr. Beck raised the possibility that people were not following the directions on the labels. She also suggested that only a small number of users had been injured. “Is it 1 percent?” Ms. Hamnett recalled Dr. Beck asking.

Ms. Hamnett said she was devastated by the line of questioning.

After years of successfully fending off Dr. Beck and her industry allies, the balance of power at the agency had shifted toward the industry.

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A postcard received by Ms. Hamnett during the early months of the Trump administration, urging her to stay the course. The sender’s information has been redacted by The New York Times.

She had long planned to wrap up her work at the agency soon, as her husband, David, had retired three years ago. On Sept. 1, Ms. Hamnett turned in her badge and joined him.

Mr. Pruitt has selected a replacement for Ms. Hamnett: Michael L. Dourson, a toxicologist who has spent the last two decades as a consultant helping businesses fight E.P.A. restrictions on the use of potentially toxic compounds. He is already at work at the agency in a temporary post while he awaits Senate confirmation.

The American Chemistry Council, and its members, are among the top private-sector sponsors of Mr. Dourson’s research. Last year, he collaborated on a paper that was funded by the trade group. His fellow author was Dr. Beck.

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