Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., plans to introduce legislation Thursday to overhaul the 34-year-old Toxic Substances Control Act, his office confirmed today.

According to a 2009 Government Accountability Office report, the law now contains so many loopholes that federal regulators have been unable to use it to protecting the public from potentially dangerous chemicals found in everyday products.

Lautenberg, who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee on Superfund, toxics and environmental health, has been working with chemical companies and public health and environment groups to respond to the public's growing concern about the chemicals in everyday products. "The American people are more and more concerned about chemicals ending up in their bodies," Lautenberg said at a March hearing. "And parents in particular are dismayed that the government is powerless to require testing of chemicals that are going into our children's bodies."

Even before the measure was unveiled, two public health groups -- the Blue Green Alliance and Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families -- issued press releases praising Lautenberg for seeking to strengthen the toxics law. "By reforming TSCA, we have an opportunity to ensure that the government has the tools it needs to enforce this law, which will protect the health and safety of workers in the chemicals industry and many others while making our environment cleaner and safer," United Steelworkers International President Leo W. Gerard, a co-founder of the Blue Green Alliance, said in a statement.

The toxics law does not require chemical makers to test new substances before using them in commercial products. As a result, roughly half of the applications for new chemicals contain no safety studies, according to a February report by the Environmental Protection Agency Inspector General's Office. Regulators also can't require companies to test a chemical already on the market unless they can prove the substance is a risk to public health. Currently 80,000 chemicals are in commercial use, but only 200 are required to be tested for safety. With the EPA's hands tied to control most chemicals, several states have adopted their own chemical mandates.

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