Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 Pesticide Registration Improvement Act (PRIA) Annual Report, the first one published since PRIA 5 was authorized in 2022. This report describes EPA’s implementation of PRIA 5 including: tracking and status for EPA’s review of pesticide registration actions, registration review cases, process improvements relating to the review of PRIA submissions, and maintenance fee set-asides for farmworker and health care provider training, partnership grants, and the pesticide safety education program.
Since 2004, PRIA has authorized the system for registering pesticides, including: registration service fees paid by applicants, specified decision review times, and funding farmworker protection activities. PRIA fees provide about one third of EPA’s pesticide program funding. The remaining two thirds come from annual appropriations. The funding is used to support EPA’s Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) pesticide regulatory activities, including the review and registration of pesticide products and periodic reevaluation of existing pesticide registrations and the establishment of maximum limits for pesticide residues in or on food and animal feed under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
In PRIA 5, Congress estimated that EPA’s pesticide program would need $166 million in appropriated funds to do its pesticides work, with the remaining funding expected to come from PRIA fees. In FY 2023, Congress appropriated $138.6 million to support pesticide program activities, $27.4 million dollars below the minimum appropriations level. For FY 2024, appropriations for the pesticide program are approximately $132.5 million, reducing EPA’s budget for the pesticide program by approximately $6 million from FY 2023, almost $33 million below the minimum level specified in PRIA 5 and over $38 million below the President’s budget request of $170.6 million.
The reduction means that EPA’s pesticide program will need to reduce the size of its office by as many as 30 full-time equivalents or significantly cut its contract support, or both. The reduced funding levels will mean additional delays in processing pesticide registration applications and completing registration review cases. Further, the FY 2023 pesticide registration service fee collections and FY 2024 PRIA fee collections to date are significantly less than anticipated (by about $6 million), leaving EPA with even fewer resources than expected. With lower than anticipated resources in FY 2023 and FY 2024, EPA is unlikely to improve its ability to routinely meet the review timeframes envisioned by pesticide stakeholders and Congress with the passage of PRIA 5, since those timeframes were predicated on much higher resource levels.
Despite budget constraints, EPA continued to improve its regulatory processes in FY 2023. The following improvements, along with others described in the report, cannot make up for the resources constraints but will lessen the impacts of the budget shortfalls.
- Began work to reduce the backlog of non-PRIA actions by directing resources and engaging in process improvements around those actions, such as closing out 3,000 notifications received under Pesticide Registration Notice 98-10 as minor label or product formulation changes.
- Made significant and timely progress toward PRIA 5 milestones, including farmworker protection and health clinician training programs, bilingual pesticide labeling, and upgrades to information technology systems.
To access the full PRIA FY 2023 Annual Report and learn more about PRIA 5 implementation, please visit EPA’s website.
