On August 11, 1982, the House of Representatives passed a bill amending and extending the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).¹ The bill would make several important changes in the statute, but one of the most significant is its attempt to resolve the long-running battle over public access to data on pesticide safety submitted by manufacturers to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a part of the pesticide registration process. Industry has long fought to protect the safety data, which are commercially valuable because they are essential to the marketability of these chemical products, while public interest groups and others have struggled equally hard for open disclosure to make possible independent analysis of the adequacy of the safety studies. The battle has raged alternately in the courts and in Congress, with 1978 amendments to FIFRA requiring disclosure and industry stalling implementation with a series of suits and administrative and legislative initiatives. Recent court decisions indicating that the legal challenges might ultimately not succeed gave added impetus to industry efforts to amend the statute. The bill that passed the House might be a workable compromise because it gives industry increased protection while allowing what appears to be meaningful public access to safety data and giving environmentalists victories on other sections of the statute. Whether the compromise holds up in the Senate remains to be seen. Environmentalists find the new disclosure conditions so complex as to stifle meaningful review of the safety data, while industry, in spite of its fear of court-ordered implementation of the current disclosure rules, is not satisfied with the new protections offered in the House-passed bill.