U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who represents Longview in Congress, successfully spearheaded an effort to restore funding for the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, the agency charged with identifying what caused the deadly implosion at the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company.

The chemical safety board is a small, nonregulatory independent federal agency. It has a budget of about $14 million, which the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed eliminating.

“The people of Longview deserve answers and across the country working people need to know we are making sure they have safe jobs where they come home every day,” Gluesenkamp Perez told members of the powerful U.S. House Appropriations Committee, of which she is a member on Wednesday.

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The first-term Democrat, who is running for reelection, said the board plays a critical role in answering what goes wrong in disasters like the one in her district. Eleven people were killed at the plant and more were injured after a tank released a highly caustic liquid. It’s believed to be Washington state’s deadliest workplace tragedy in nearly a century.

“If we want to be a country that makes things — things that are worth having — we need to support the people making them,” she said.

Lawmakers approved Gluesenkamp Perez’s amendment earlier this week to the massive spending bill, which would restore the agency’s funding to $14 million. The bill now heads to the House floor for a vote.

Gluesenkamp Perez nodded to the agency’s relatively tiny budget in the scheme of the federal government’s spending in an interview Thursday on OPB’s “Think Out Loud.”

“When you watch the way that money moves through appropriations, it is shocking that they’re looking for pennies under the couch at the expense of families who are grieving,” she said.

U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez on Longview mill disaster, ongoing federal investigation

Gluesenkamp Perez’s amendment received bipartisan support. The Republican chair of the appropriations subcommittee U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson is from Idaho.

“They have a strong relationship with the timber industry (in Idaho) and understand how tragedies like this impact families and how vital it is that we continue to have a domestic timber industry, especially with the incursion of plastic imports replacing our natural resource economy,” Gluesenkamp Perez said.

Shortly after the Longview catastrophe, investigators from the chemical safety board showed up. They will likely examine the construction of the tank to look for cracks or corrosion or venting problems. They will comb through maintenance records to find potential equipment errors. They will interview employees, managers and engineers to determine causation and issue recommendations on how to prevent future accidents, according to former investigators.

“There was something dramatically wrong with the tank that caused it to rupture or collapse,” John Bresland, a former chair of the federal chemical safety board told OPB.

The Trump administration told OPB previously that it views the CSB as “an unconstitutional independent agency that directly violates the prerogative of the President to oversee the executive branch as he sees fit.”

“Furthermore, CSB is redundant and duplicates authorities properly vested in EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration),” a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget said in an emailed response to a query sent to the White House last week. “That is why the Trump Administration has proposed eliminating CSB in every single budget we’ve produced.”

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Bresland, the former chair of the board, argued in an opinion piece that the chemical safety board’s role is different from the other agencies.

While the other two agencies focus on more specific problems related to the environment or workplaces standards that were violated, the chemical safety board’s mission is different.

“It investigates the root causes of catastrophic chemical incidents and issues independent recommendations to prevent recurrence,” Bresland wrote. “If we eliminate the CSB, we eliminate the one agency designed to learn the deeper lessons — and to publish them for everyone to use.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/06/04/longview-implosion-gluesenkamp-perez/