A person unfamiliar with the intricacies of chemical regulation in the U.S. might assume that regulators are hard at work weeding out dangerous products, requiring warnings on thousands of others, and collecting copious toxicity research on the rest.  In truth, however, the regulatory regime in the U.S. works nothing like this.  There is little information available to regulators for evaluating possible hazards of chemicals and, even for the limited research that does exist, some unspecified portion of the scientific studies is at risk of being biased or otherwise unreliable.  Since EPA focuses most of its firepower on regulating individual chemical substances rather than chemical mixtures, moreover, consumers have little notion of the comparative toxicity of the chemical products on the market and lack adequate instructions regarding their proper use.  There is simply no way to sugarcoat the ugly truth: Chemical regulation in the U.S. has been a dismal failure.
    This article considers the entrenched failure of chemical regulation and offers a different angle for regulatory reform that taps into market competition between rival firms to produce relevant information about the toxicity of certain chemical products on the market.   By repositioning regulatory decisions as an adjudication between rival manufacturers, the proposed regulatory process is fueled by the expertise, information, and energies of manufacturers of safer products eager to put their more hazardous competitor products out of business.  This shift in regulatory approach also breaks up the unified political coalition of manufacturers into two groups – those that might enjoy competitive benefits from such a proposal because they have been vigilant in testing their products and those that will lose because they have not.  While this shift does not guarantee that some manufacturers may be persuaded to support a competition-based reform of toxics policy, it at least provides some hope of an altered configuration of stakeholders that prove less resilient in opposing reform.