Science
How the FDA allows companies to add secret ingredients to our food
It’s a U.S. Food and Drug Administration rule that most Americans know little about, yet gives corporations the license to add potentially harmful ingredients to foods without regulatory oversight or public notice.
For decades, the FDA’s “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, designation has allowed food makers to decide for themselves whether certain novel ingredients are safe or not — even without providing evidence to agency scientists.
Consumer advocates claim the system has allowed companies to add harmful chemicals, including suspected carcinogens, to such products as cereals, baked goods, ice cream, potato chips and chewing gum.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Service promises to elevate the issue. Although Kennedy’s penchant for amplifying medical conspiracies and his anti-vaccination activism have alarmed many public health experts, his vow to crack down on chemical additives in food has resonated with consumer health advocates.
The problem, critics say, is that a GRAS determination is supposed to follow a scientific assessment, ideally one conducted by independent experts.
Under the law, however, it is entirely optional for companies to share their assessments with FDA reviewers. That means the FDA and American consumers are in the dark about hundreds of compounds in processed foods.
“FDA cannot ensure the safety of our food supply if it does not know what is in our food,” said Thomas Galligan, principal scientist for food additives and supplements at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
When the agency does learn about a new compound, it evaluates the company’s safety report to see whether it agrees. If FDA scientists see problems and request additional information, the company doesn’t have to provide it. It can simply withdraw its GRAS notice and use the ingredient anyway.
Natalie Mihalek, a former prosecutor and current state legislator in Pennsylvania, said she doesn’t understand why the FDA treats food additives like criminal defendants — “innocent until proven guilty, safe until proven otherwise.”
“Right now we’re relying on the companies that are going to profit off selling these substances to do the research for us,” said Mihalek, a Republican who has introduced a bill to ban six food dyes in her state. “It just blows my mind.”
FDA officials acknowledge the limits of the GRAS system but say they don’t have the authority to change it.
“Congress sets GRAS as part of the law,” said Kristi Muldoon Jacobs, director of the FDA’s Office of Food Additive Safety. “It is our responsibility to administer the law. We do not in fact have the authority to make the laws.”
Concern about the safety and purity of food prompted Congress to pass the Food and Drugs Act in 1906, just months after Upton Sinclair brought the meatpacking industry’s unsanitary practices to light in his book “The Jungle.” The new law forbade the manufacture and sale of foods that were “adulterated or misbranded or poisonous.”
The FDA’s regulatory powers expanded in 1938 with the passage of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and a 1958 amendment divided food ingredients into two categories: additives that must be assessed for safety, and substances that could go straight into foods because they are “generally recognized as safe.”
Unfortunately, the legal distinction between the two kinds of ingredients is “very vague,” said Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health lawyer at New York University’s School of Global Public Health.
The types of ingredients that were considered GRAS in 1958 included items that were already in wide use, such as salt, vanilla extract, baking powder and vinegar.
The FDA established a list of GRAS substances and added new items if they passed a safety review. Individuals from outside the agency also could ask to have a particular substance studied for inclusion on the official GRAS list.
But the process was time-consuming, and petitions from industry could take six years or more to evaluate. As part of the Clinton-era initiative to streamline government operations, the FDA embraced a newer, faster system designed to make it more enticing for companies to keep the agency in the loop about their GRAS decisions. Now the FDA pledges to respond to GRAS notices within 180 days.
The notification process is also low-risk for food companies.
If everything looks good, the FDA says it has “no questions” about the compound, effectively endorsing the GRAS assessment. This happens about 80% of the time, according to researchers Thomas Neltner and Maricel Maffini, who analyzed notices filed with the agency.
If things aren’t so clear, the agency may say it needs more information before it can weigh in. And if a company decides not to provide that information, it can back out of the process and the FDA will say it ended its evaluation at the filer’s request.
Such was the case with an ingredient in Sleepy Chocolate.
Not just another gourmet candy bar, the dark chocolate with lavender and blueberry flavors is infused with the hormone melatonin, the amino acid L-tryptophan, a blend of soothing botanicals and something called PharmaGABA, an artificial version of a neurotransmitter that calms the brain.
PharmaGABA is made by Pharma Foods International Co. of Kyoto, Japan. The company touts its product as having “US-FDA’s self-affirmed GRAS approval” even though the FDA twice raised serious concerns about its safety and has never indicated to the public that its misgivings were addressed.
Nothing about this violates the law.
Neltner, a chemical engineer and attorney, and Maffini, a biochemist and consultant, dug into the FDA’s files on PharmaGABA to see why regulators were concerned about it.
In its initial notice filed in 2008, Pharma Foods said it hired a Canadian consulting firm to determine whether PharmaGABA should qualify for GRAS status when used in candy, chewing gum, beverages and other products.
The consulting firm produced a report about the product and tapped three university professors with expertise in pharmacology, toxicology and food science to weigh in. The trio’s determination that the product was “safe and suitable and would be GRAS” was unanimous, according to the filing.
Yet after reviewing all 155 pages of the PharmaGABA notice, FDA scientists raised concerns about the product’s purity, its risk for causing low blood pressure and electrolyte imbalances, and the lack of data on how PharmaGABA is metabolized, among other problems.
Pharma Foods withdrew its notice, and the FDA ended its evaluation.
The company tried again in 2015 with a GRAS notice for using PharmaGABA in yogurts and cheese, cereals and snack bars, candy and gum, and an array of beverages including sports drinks and flavored milks. The same consulting firm assembled a scientific panel that said consuming PharmaGABA in expected quantities was “reasonably expected to be safe.”
As before, FDA reviewers had concerns. They said the new filing didn’t back the company’s claims that the product would be absorbed into the bloodstream at low levels and that it wouldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier. The reviewers were particularly concerned with the compound’s potential to harm pregnant women and children, as well as its effect on the pituitary gland.
Pharma Foods withdrew its notice so it could “conduct further studies,” and the FDA ceased its second evaluation of the product.
Maffini said it wasn’t unusual for agency scientists to find fault with GRAS decisions that passed muster with hired consultants. Giving their clients favorable reviews increases their chances of being hired again, she said.
Nine years later, Pharma Foods has yet to share additional results with the FDA. But PharmaGABA legally remains in Sleepy Chocolate based on Pharma Foods’ determination that the compound should be generally recognized as safe.
Pharma Foods International and Functional Chocolate Co., which makes Sleepy Chocolate, did not respond to requests to discuss PharmaGABA’s safety.
Maffini said she was frustrated that the FDA scientists who examined PharmaGABA couldn’t post a memo to warn the public about their concerns. (She and Neltner obtained the GRAS documents by filing a Freedom of Information Act request.)
“They ask questions,” Maffini said of the agency scientists, “but then there’s really nothing they can do.”
For every ingredient like PharmaGABA that is disclosed to the FDA, another probably makes its way to the market without any regulatory review.
By definition, there’s no way to know for sure how many new additives are granted GRAS status in secret. To make an estimate, researchers scoured websites and trade journals to find every corporate announcement of a new GRAS product during an eight-week period. Ten of those products weren’t on the FDA’s GRAS notice list.
If those eight weeks were typical, at least 65 new substances are being introduced into the food supply every year without any vetting by the agency. That’s on a par with the 60 to 70 GRAS notices that Muldoon Jacobs said the FDA evaluates each year.
The situation is something of a catch-22, Pomeranz said: Since GRAS products are presumed to be safe, they aren’t subject to regulatory review. But since they’re not regulated, how can the public be assured that they’re safe?
And that’s only part of the problem, she said. When companies use novel ingredients, they can list them on food labels using generic terms like “flavors” or “colors.” That makes it all but impossible for consumers to know that something new has been added to their food, she said.
This helps explain how an ingredient called tara flour was able to sicken hundreds of people who consumed French Lentil + Leek Crumbles, a meat replacement product sold by Daily Harvest in 2022. Customers suffered severe abdominal pain, fever, chills and acute liver failure, and more than 100 were hospitalized, according to the FDA. The company issued a voluntary recall and blamed a compound in tara flour for the illnesses.
Tara flour is a high-protein substance made from the seeds of an evergreen tree found in South America. There is no GRAS notice for the ingredient in the FDA’s database. Tests conducted after the outbreak found that an amino acid in the flour caused liver damage in mice.
In May, nearly two years after the recall, the FDA concluded that tara flour doesn’t meet the scientific standard to qualify for GRAS status. That makes it an unapproved food additive and is considered unsafe.
The agency added that it’s not aware of any products made in the U.S. that contain tara flour, nor has it identified any imported products that contain the ingredient.
The case shows why the FDA’s regulatory approach needs to change, said Jensen N. Jose, regulatory counsel for food chemical safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
“Self-declaring that your chemical is safe should not be the law of the land,” Jose said. “I highly doubt that’s what Congress meant” when it created the GRAS designation in 1958, he said.
Bills introduced in the U.S. House and Senate would put an end to the practice of allowing companies to make GRAS determinations in secret. The legislation would require companies to share their scientific reviews and give the FDA and the public at least 90 days to review — and potentially challenge — them before they take effect, among other provisions.
But both bills have a ways to go in order to pass before the congressional term ends in January.
Jose has another idea for reducing the secrecy surrounding novel food ingredients: Require companies using self-declared GRAS ingredients to submit the safety data to the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets in Albany as a condition for selling their products in the Empire State.
Jose laid out the plan in a bill that is under consideration in the New York state Legislature. If it passes, state regulators would not be required to review the safety data, but at least it would become publicly available, he said.
“The goal is that you’d have a database so if something like tara flour happens, the FDA can look there and be able to respond more quickly,” Jose said.
Companies could avoid the notification requirement by keeping their products out of New York stores, but that would be a tip-off to watchdog groups like his, Jose said.
“If we find them selling everywhere except New York, we’ll know there might be something wrong with this chemical,” he said.
Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, has acknowledged the “growing public demand for the FDA to do more to ensure the safety of chemicals currently in the U.S. food supply.”
California and other states have sought to fill the void by regulating or banning select food additives within their borders. But “a strong national food-safety system is not built state-by-state,” Jones said. “The FDA must lead the way.”
SACRAMENTO — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has positioned himself as a national public health leader by staking out science-backed policies in contrast with the Trump administration.
After Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez for refusing what her lawyers called “the dangerous politicization of science,” Newsom hired her to help modernize California’s public health system. He also gave a job to Debra Houry, the agency’s former chief science and medical officer, who had resigned in protest hours after Monarez’s firing.
Newsom also teamed up with fellow Democratic governors Tina Kotek of Oregon, Bob Ferguson of Washington and Josh Green of Hawaii to form the West Coast Health Alliance, a regional public health agency, whose guidance the governors said would “uphold scientific integrity in public health as Trump destroys” the CDC’s credibility. Newsom argued establishing the independent alliance was vital as Kennedy leads the Trump administration’s rollback of national vaccine recommendations.
More recently, California became the first state to join a global outbreak response network coordinated by the World Health Organization, followed by Illinois and New York. Colorado and Wisconsin signaled they plan to join. They did so after President Trump officially withdrew the United States from the agency on the grounds that it had “strayed from its core mission and has acted contrary to the U.S. interests in protecting the U.S. public on multiple occasions.” Newsom said joining the WHO-led consortium would enable California to respond faster to communicable disease outbreaks and other public health threats.
Although other Democratic governors and public health leaders have openly criticized the federal government, few have been as outspoken as Newsom, who is considering a run for president in 2028 and is in his second and final term as governor. Members of the scientific community have praised his effort to build a public health bulwark against the Trump administration’s slashing of funding and scaling back of vaccine recommendations.
What Newsom is doing “is a great idea,” said Paul Offit, an outspoken critic of Kennedy and a vaccine expert who formerly served on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee but was removed under Trump in 2025.
“Public health has been turned on its head,” Offit said. “We have an anti-vaccine activist and science denialist as the head of U.S. Health and Human Services. It’s dangerous.”
The White House did not respond to questions about Newsom’s stance and Health and Human Services declined requests to interview Kennedy. Instead, federal health officials criticized Democrats broadly, arguing that blue states are participating in fraud and mismanagement of federal funds in public health programs.
Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard said the administration is going after “Democrat-run states that pushed unscientific lockdowns, toddler mask mandates, and draconian vaccine passports during the COVID era.” She said those moves have “completely eroded the American people’s trust in public health agencies.”
Public health guided by science
Since Trump returned to office, Newsom has criticized the president and his administration for engineering policies that he sees as an affront to public health and safety, labeling federal leaders as “extremists” trying to “weaponize the CDC and spread misinformation.” He has excoriated federal officials for erroneously linking vaccines to autism, warning that the administration is endangering the lives of infants and young children in scaling back childhood vaccine recommendations. And he argued that the White House is unleashing “chaos” on America’s public health system in backing out of the WHO.
The governor declined an interview request, but Newsom spokesperson Marissa Saldivar said it’s a priority of the governor “to protect public health and provide communities with guidance rooted in science and evidence, not politics and conspiracies.”
The Trump administration’s moves have triggered financial uncertainty that local officials said has reduced morale within public health departments and left states unprepared for disease outbreaks and prevention efforts. The White House last year proposed cutting Health and Human Services spending by $33 billion, including $3.6 billion from the CDC. Congress largely rejected those cuts last month, although funding for programs focusing on social drivers of health, such as access to food, housing and education, were axed.
The Trump administration announced that it would claw back more than $600 million in public health funds from California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, arguing that the Democratic-led states were funding “woke” initiatives that didn’t reflect White House priorities. Within days, the states sued and a judge temporarily blocked the cut.
“They keep suddenly canceling grants and then it gets overturned in court,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Assn. of California. “A lot of the damage is already done because counties already stopped doing the work.”
Federal funding has accounted for more than half of state and local health department budgets nationwide, with money going toward fighting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, preventing chronic diseases, and boosting public health preparedness and communicable disease response, according to a 2025 analysis by KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News.
Federal funds account for $2.4 billion of California’s $5.3-billion public health budget, making it difficult for Newsom and state lawmakers to backfill potential cuts. That money helps fund state operations and is vital for local health departments.
Funding cuts hurt all
Los Angeles County public health director Barbara Ferrer said if the federal government is allowed to cut that $600 million, the county of nearly 10 million residents would lose an estimated $84 million over the next two years, in addition to other grants for prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Ferrer said the county depends on nearly $1 billion in federal funding annually to track and prevent communicable diseases and combat chronic health conditions, including diabetes and high blood pressure. Already, the county has announced the closure of seven public health clinics that provided vaccinations and disease testing, largely because of funding losses tied to federal grant cuts.
“It’s an ill-informed strategy,” Ferrer said. “Public health doesn’t care whether your political affiliation is Republican or Democrat. It doesn’t care about your immigration status or sexual orientation. Public health has to be available for everyone.”
A single case of measles requires public health workers to track down 200 potential contacts, Ferrer said.
The U.S. eliminated measles in 2000 but is close to losing that status as a result of vaccine skepticism and misinformation spread by vaccine critics. The U.S. had 2,281 confirmed cases last year, the most since 1991, with 93% in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. This year, the highly contagious disease has been reported at schools, airports and Disneyland.
Public health officials hope the West Coast Health Alliance can help counteract Trump by building trust through evidence-based public health guidance.
“What we’re seeing from the federal government is partisan politics at its worst and retaliation for policy differences, and it puts at extraordinary risk the health and well-being of the American people,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn., a coalition of public health professionals.
Robust vaccine schedule
Erica Pan, California’s top public health officer and director of the state Department of Public Health, said the West Coast Health Alliance is defending science by recommending a more robust vaccine schedule than the federal government. California is part of a coalition suing the Trump administration over its decision to rescind recommendations for seven childhood vaccines, including for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza and COVID-19.
Pan expressed deep concern about the state of public health, particularly the uptick in measles. “We’re sliding backwards,” Pan said of immunizations.
Sarah Kemble, Hawaii’s state epidemiologist, said Hawaii joined the alliance after hearing from pro-vaccine residents who wanted assurance that they would have access to vaccines.
“We were getting a lot of questions and anxiety from people who did understand science-based recommendations but were wondering, ‘Am I still going to be able to go get my shot?’” Kemble said.
Other states led mostly by Democrats have also formed alliances, with Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and several other East Coast states banding together to create the Northeast Public Health Collaborative.
Hilliard, of Health and Human Services, said that even as Democratic governors establish vaccine advisory coalitions, the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “remains the scientific body guiding immunization recommendations in this country, and HHS will ensure policy is based on rigorous evidence and gold standard science, not the failed politics of the pandemic.”
Influencing red states
Newsom, for his part, has approved a recurring annual infusion of nearly $300 million to support the state Department of Public Health, as well as the 61 local public health agencies across California, and last year signed a bill authorizing the state to issue its own immunization guidance. It requires health insurers in California to provide patient coverage for vaccinations the state recommends even if the federal government doesn’t.
Jeffrey Singer, a doctor and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, said decentralization can be beneficial. That’s because local media campaigns that reflect different political ideologies and community priorities may have a better chance of influencing the public.
A KFF analysis found some red states are joining blue states in decoupling their vaccine recommendations from the federal government’s. Singer said some doctors in his home state of Arizona are looking to more liberal California for vaccine recommendations.
“Science is never settled, and there are a lot of areas of this country where there are differences of opinion,” Singer said. “This can help us challenge our assumptions and learn.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.
Two friends bought nearly identical homes last year, in the same northern Minnesota neighborhood, for the same price.
But Tara Novak pays more than twice as much for home insurance as Petra Rodriguez. The only difference? Ms. Novak has a lower credit score.
Across the country, people with weaker credit histories are paying far more for home insurance than owners with spotless records.
Where the home insurance rate gap between “fair” and “excellent” credit is higher
Home insurance premiums have risen rapidly in recent years, fueled by climate change, building costs and inflation. The price shock has rippled into the real estate market, dragging down home prices in areas vulnerable to disasters and leading insurers to abandon homeowners in risky places.
But these dynamics obscure another problem: The home insurance market has cleaved in two along a boundary defined more by a customer’s personal history than by the risk of a disaster hitting their home.
Americans with weaker credit histories, usually from missed payments or high amounts of debt, now pay significantly more for insurance, regardless of where they live, two new studies have found. While those with poor credit histories often can’t purchase homes at all, people with “fair” scores, which range from around 580 to 669, are paying twice as much in some places as people with “excellent” scores of about 800 or higher. And the gap is growing.
Insurers use a metric based on credit history known as an insurance score to set rates, and the figure tracks closely with a customer’s credit score.
The penalty for having a “fair” credit history versus an “excellent” one
States with the biggest pricing gaps
That can mean owners of identical homes, like Ms. Novak and Ms. Rodriguez, pay wildly different rates to insure them. For most people, it’s now just as expensive to have a credit score of “fair” as it is to live in an area likely to experience a disaster like a hurricane or wildfire. About 29 percent of consumers have credit scores that are categorized as “fair” or “poor.”
“There’s so many reasons people have bad credit,” Ms. Novak said. “It’s not like I’ve ever not paid a bill on time. I’m a stickler on my bills, I’m a stickler on my rent, never been late. This is not fair.”
“The choice to use credit scores in pricing means that those lower-credit home owners in risky areas are effectively subsidizing more affluent high-credit homeowners who also live in risky areas,” said Nick Graetz, assistant professor of sociology at the University for Minnesota, who wrote one of the recent papers. “So in a lot of ways, you can keep your insurance price down if you’re high income, high credit — even if you live on the coast of Florida.”
A handful of states have banned insurers from using credit data because of concerns about fairness and the potential for discrimination against low-income people and people of color, but the majority allow it.
For those with both weaker credit and high disaster risk, the combination can set them up for a downward spiral: disasters tend to be followed by decreases in credit scores as people use credit cards and bank loans to recover. That can lead to higher insurance rates, pushing monthly housing costs further out of reach.
“When a disaster hits, there’s a loss of income that occurs, and then that can impact someone’s credit score because they can’t pay their debt, they can’t pay their rent, they can’t pay their mortgage,” said Lance Triggs, executive vice president at Operation HOPE, a financial literacy nonprofit. “And now they’re faced with higher insurance premiums post-disaster.”
A working paper released today by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that homeowners with the lowest credit scores paid, on average, $550 more in 2024 for home insurance than those with the highest scores.
The findings broadly track with data from Quadrant Information Services analyzed by The New York Times, which found that, on average, lower credit scores meant higher premiums across every state that allowed the practice. Dr. Graetz used the same data set for his research, which he did in collaboration with the Consumer Federation of America and the Climate and Community Institute.
When a windstorm last year hit the home of Audrey Thayer, a city council member in Bemidji, Minn., it ripped the siding off her house and stripped shingles from her roof.
Ms. Thayer’s insurance did not cover all the damage. As she fought her insurer for more money, she opened new credit cards and bank loans to repair her home. Her credit score dropped as she tried to find a new insurance plan.
Ms. Thayer, a member of the White Earth Nation, said she was not aware that her credit score could affect her home insurance rates, even though she teaches about credit ratings at a nearby tribal college. “Most of the folks here do not have good credit,” said Ms. Thayer, whose community is one of the poorest in the state. “I did not know what a credit score was until I was 35 or so.”
In Texas, the advocacy group Texas Appleseed found that some insurers charge people with poor credit up to 12 times as much as people with excellent credit for certain policies, said Ann Baddour, the director of the nonprofit’s Fair Financial Services Project.
Higher costs have serious implications for low-income homeowners who live in the path of hurricanes, said Nadia Erosa, the operations manager at Come Dream Come Build, a nonprofit community housing development organization. After the Brownsville, Texas, region saw intense flooding last spring, some residents turned to companies offering high-interest loans to fund repairs, she said, raising the risk of the disaster-credit spiral.
“Delinquencies are going up because people cannot afford their payment,” she said.
The price of risk
Before they can get a mortgage, homebuyers are usually required by lenders to purchase home insurance.
“Households with insurance have fewer financial burdens, fewer unmet needs, they recover faster, they’re more likely to rebuild,” said Carolyn Kousky, an economist and founder of Insurance for Good, a nonprofit that focuses on finding new approaches to risk management. “Yet the people who need insurance the most are the least able to afford it.”
Insurance companies consider a variety of factors when setting the premium for a property. They might examine the age of the roof, or the area’s vulnerability to hurricanes or wildfires. They factor in how much it would cost to rebuild the house if it were damaged.
Insurers have argued that credit history is also worth considering because people with low scores tend to file more claims than those with excellent scores, an assertion that is backed up by the working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research today. This likely happens because people with weaker credit histories tend to have less income, and when their home is damaged, they file insurance claims for smaller fixes that a wealthier homeowner might pay for out of pocket.
Paul Tetrault, senior director at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, a trade organization, said credit scores are a valid way to price premiums.
But others argue that using credit information to price insurance doesn’t make sense.
Because a homeowner pays for insurance upfront, “it’s not like you’re really extending a loan to the customer where you would be worried about the risk of repayment,” Ms. Kousky said. She points out that insurance companies can opt not to renew a homeowner’s policy if they believe it is too risky — a tactic they have been using with increasing frequency.
The NBER analysis found that homeowners who want to pay less for insurance should pay off debt to raise their credit score rather than replace roofs and make other improvements to avoid damage when disaster strikes.
Others believe that even if credit scores are accurate predictors of future claims, they shouldn’t be used to set premiums because that can perpetuate or worsen disparities. For example, people in their mid-20s who are Black, low-income, or grow up in impoverished regions have significantly lower credit scores than their peers, a July working paper from Opportunity Insights, a not-for-profit organization at Harvard University, found.
“When the government and the financial system mandate that we buy a product, there’s a special obligation to make sure the pricing is fair,” said Doug Heller, director of insurance at the Consumer Federation. “To me that is an absolutely solid reason, just like we don’t allow pricing based on race or income or ethnicity or religion.”
A natural experiment
A handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, have banned or limited the use of credit scores in setting home insurance premiums, despite opposition from the insurance industry.
In Nevada, where a temporary pandemic-related rule prevented insurers from using credit history to increase premiums for existing customers from 2020 to 2024, companies refunded approximately $27 million to nearly 200,000 policyholders, said Drew Pearson, a spokesman for the Nevada Division of Insurance.
Perhaps the clearest example of the effects of these bans comes from Washington State, which banned the use of credit information in setting home insurance premiums starting in June 2021. The rule immediately faced legal challenges, and was in effect for just a few months until it was overturned in court.
But the episode allowed researchers to evaluate the effect of credit factors on insurance premiums. When the rule took effect, people with the lowest credit scores saw a decrease in premiums of about $175 annually while those with the highest scores saw an increase of about $100, the NBER analysis found.
“We could see the dynamics of insurance pricing for the same households over time,” said Benjamin Keys, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who co-authored the paper.
What homeowners paid before and after a ban on credit-based pricing in Washington State
Values compared with premiums paid by homeowners with “medium” credit scores (717 to 756)
In Minnesota, where Tara Novak, Petra Rodriguez and Audrey Thayer live, a state task force looked at ways to lower insurance costs for residents. It recently considered a ban or limit on the use of credit scores to set rates, but did not move forward with a recommendation.
Ms. Rodriguez said she doesn’t think it’s fair that her friend Ms. Novak should have to pay so much more for insurance to live in an identical house.
A credit score doesn’t capture anything about a person’s habits, or what they’re like as a tenant, or even years of on-time rent payments, she said. “It’s not who you are,” she said.
Methodology
Home insurance policy rates were supplied by Quadrant Information Services, an insurance data solutions company. The rates shown are representative of publicly sourced filings and should not be interpreted as bindable quotes. Actual individual premiums may vary.
‘States with the biggest pricing gaps’Rates shown are based on a home insurance policy with $400,000 of dwelling coverage and a $100,000 liability limit on a new home, for a homeowner age 50 or younger. Rates are averaged for all the individual company filings represented in the sample, which add up to a majority of the market share in each state but do not cover all active insurers in the state. Rates are also averaged to the state level from zip code level data.
‘The credit penalty in each state’Each insurance company incorporates credit history information differently, often using proprietary methods, so the scores do not map directly to FICO credit scores.
‘What homeowners paid before and after a ban on credit-based pricing in Washington State’Data shown are based on observations of real home insurance policies and homeowner credit scores from ICE McDash analyzed by the researchers of Blonz, Hossain, Keys, Mulder and Weill (2026). The price comparisons across credit score tiers controlled for variance in disaster risk, insurance policy characteristics, geography, and other year to year fluctuations.
Planetary warming has significantly accelerated over the past 10 years, with temperatures rising at a higher rate since 2015 than in any previous decade on record, a new study showed.
The Earth warmed around 0.35 degrees Celsius in the decade to 2025, compared to just under 0.2C per decade on average between 1970 and 2015, according to a paper published on Friday in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. This is the first statistically significant evidence of an acceleration of global warming, the authors said.
The past three years have been the hottest on record, compared to the average before the Industrial Revolution. In 2024, warming went past 1.5C, the lower limit set by the Paris Agreement. That target refers to temperature increases over 20 years, but breaching it for one year shows efforts to slow down climate change have been insufficient, the scientists who wrote the new paper said.
The findings shed light on an ongoing debate among researchers. While there is consensus that greenhouse gas emissions have caused the planet to heat up since pre-industrial times, that warming had been steady for decades. But record-breaking temperatures in recent years have led scientists to question whether the pace of temperature gains is accelerating.
Demonstrating that was difficult due to natural fluctuations in temperatures. The researchers filtered out the “noise” to make the “underlying long-term warming signal” more clearly visible, said Grant Foster, a co-author of the study and a U.S.-based statistics expert.
Researchers isolated phenomena including the El Niño weather phase, volcanic eruptions and solar irradiance. When looking at temperature increases without their influence, the authors concluded the evidence is “strong” that the accelerated warming was not due to an unusually hot 2023 and 2024, but that since 2015 global temperatures departed from their previous, slower path of warming.
The new report adds to a growing body of work that indicates climate change is having a quicker and larger impact on the planet than scientists have understood. A separate paper published this week found that many studies on sea-level increases underestimate how much water along the coast has already risen.
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the lead author of the warming study and a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “How quickly the Earth continues to warm ultimately depends on how rapidly we reduce global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to zero.”
Millan writes for Bloomberg.
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Wisconsin1 week agoSetting sail on iceboats across a frozen lake in Wisconsin
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Massachusetts1 week agoMassachusetts man awaits word from family in Iran after attacks
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Maryland1 week agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
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Pennsylvania5 days agoPa. man found guilty of raping teen girl who he took to Mexico
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Florida1 week agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
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Detroit, MI5 days agoU.S. Postal Service could run out of money within a year
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Miami, FL6 days agoCity of Miami celebrates reopening of Flagler Street as part of beautification project
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Sports6 days agoKeith Olbermann under fire for calling Lou Holtz a ‘scumbag’ after legendary coach’s death