EPA Wants to Scale Back RMP. OSHA Still Has PSM.
On February 24, 2026, EPA published a proposed rule that would rescind or significantly scale back a number of requirements added by the 2024 Risk Management Program rule. The stated goal is to reduce compliance burden and bring RMP back into closer alignment with OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard. If it lands, some facilities get real paperwork relief. What none of them get is relief from the physics. A relief system, a scrubber, or a vent filter that was undersized in 2024 is still undersized in 2027, regardless of which agency is asking about it.
The Rollback Is Proposed, Not Final
The proposal is exactly that. EPA has said it’s targeting completion ahead of the compliance dates currently on the books, which means facilities are in the awkward position of planning against a rule that may change and a deadline that hasn’t moved yet. The prudent read is that the documentation requirements are genuinely in play and the underlying mechanical integrity expectations are not. Building a compliance plan that assumes maximum relief is a bet on a comment docket.
PSM Never Went Anywhere
OSHA’s PSM standard is the floor here, and it’s untouched by any of this. Mechanical integrity, process hazard analysis, management of change, and operating procedures all still apply to covered processes. Where RMP and PSM overlap — and the proposal is explicitly about increasing that overlap — the practical effect for most facilities is that the work you were doing for PSM was already doing double duty. If your RMP program was a separate binder that duplicated PSM, that’s the part likely to get simpler.
Emission Control Equipment Sits in Both Programs and Gets Audited by Neither Well
Scrubbers, vent filters, carbon beds, and thermal oxidizers are frequently treated as environmental equipment by the safety team and as safety equipment by the environmental team. That’s how a carbon bed reaches breakthrough with nobody tracking it, or a scrubber’s packing degrades with no inspection interval assigned. Whichever way the RMP proposal resolves, the equipment that keeps a release from becoming an incident needs an owner, an inspection interval, and a media change schedule tied to actual performance rather than the calendar.
Vast Filtration comes from a filtration background three generations deep, and we understand that emission control media is process safety equipment, not a consumable line item. We source cartridge filters, carbon, and the media scrubbers and vent systems need directly from the manufacturers who make them, with lead time quoted honestly up front — because a control device out of service can shut a unit down. And we don’t quote more media or a bigger system than your actual loading calls for. Chemical processing has been part of that work for years, and if you’re sourcing scrubber media, plant ventilation, and process water filtration through separate vendors, our vendor consolidation guide covers what it takes to bring those under one partner.
If your scrubber or carbon bed doesn’t currently have a named owner and a change-out interval based on measured performance, that gap exists under either version of the rule. For more on how we approach emission control, plant air, and process water together, see our Chemical Processing industry page.