Legislation introduced in the House would force the Environmental Protection Agency to rely on more rigorous reproductive toxicity data when setting pesticide residue limits on food.
Representative Nancy Mace introduced H.R. 10145, the Scientific Oversight for Unbiased and Neutral Data in Pesticide Research Act, on August 24, 2026, with no cosponsors at the time of filing.
The bill targets the process by which the EPA sets, modifies, maintains, or removes tolerances and exemptions for pesticide chemical residues found on food products.
Under the proposed legislation, the EPA would be required to base its decisions on data deemed comprehensive by the agency itself, raising the bar for what qualifies as acceptable scientific evidence.
A central requirement of the bill is that any relevant safety data must be derived from a multigenerational reproductive toxicity study spanning at least four generations of test species.
That standard is notably more demanding than current EPA practice, which does not uniformly require multigenerational studies of that length for pesticide residue determinations.
The bill would also impose a strict timeline on the EPA following enactment, requiring the agency’s administrator to begin reviewing all existing pesticide residue tolerance decisions within 180 days.
That review process would require the administrator to assess whether each prior determination is adequately supported by the type of long-term reproductive study data the bill mandates.
Any decisions found to lack sufficient backing under the new standard would need to be updated or revised to bring them into compliance with the legislation’s requirements.
Within two years of the bill becoming law, the EPA would be required to submit a formal report to Congress detailing each decision that was reviewed, updated, or otherwise changed as a result of the new data requirements.
The legislation reflects a broader push by some lawmakers to tighten scientific standards used in federal regulatory decisions, particularly those that affect food safety and public health over the long term.
Multigenerational reproductive toxicity studies are considered among the most thorough tools available for detecting harmful effects of chemical exposure across successive generations of living organisms.
Critics of current EPA methodology have long argued that shorter or less comprehensive studies may miss cumulative or delayed health effects that only emerge over multiple generations of exposure.
If passed, the bill would represent one of the more significant structural changes to how the EPA handles pesticide residue science in recent years, compelling a sweeping reassessment of its existing regulatory record.
