The situation is somewhat better with chemicals introduced after 1976. Any chemical that was in use prior to 1976 is grandfathered in, due to worries from industry that passage of the Act could suddenly call into question many chemicals then in use. Therefore anything that was already in use at the time is presumed safe and not investigated, unless significant evidence first piles up. The chemicals being described in this story (e.g. the PBDEs) are pre-1976, and hence not investigated.
Some of the older ones, like the PBDEs, have been the subject of thousands of studies and have since been taken off the market (although many of us still have them in our furniture).
--From the NYT article. There is alot of failure avoidance, it seems.
Edit: And also from the Wiki. you site:
The report further acknowledges that trade secrets are preventing effective testing. Sometimes the EPA does not even know what chemical the TSCA application refers to, and cannot report any problems because "health and safety data are of limited value if the chemical the data pertain to is unknown."[6]
This is going on with Fracking chemicals, at the moment.
The latter part is a major thing that really should be fixed, I agree. In many of these cases, it seems fairly clear that the invocation of trade secrets is pretextual (the goal is not actually to protect a valuable secret from competitors), and the real motive is preventing third-party investigations into chemical safety.
The situation is somewhat better with chemicals introduced after 1976. Any chemical that was in use prior to 1976 is grandfathered in, due to worries from industry that passage of the Act could suddenly call into question many chemicals then in use. Therefore anything that was already in use at the time is presumed safe and not investigated, unless significant evidence first piles up. The chemicals being described in this story (e.g. the PBDEs) are pre-1976, and hence not investigated.