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Rules governing environmental health and waste management — such as drinking water, air quality, hazardous substances, contaminated site cleanup, and solid or hazardous waste handling — would face new limits on how strict Utah agencies can make them. Under this bill, state agencies could not create or update numeric limits on regulated substances that are stricter than existing federal standards; where no federal standard exists, agencies could only set new numeric limits if the science relied upon meets specific standards for reliability and, when the rule is meant to protect human health, demonstrates a direct causal link between exposure and a presently diagnosable physical illness or injury, not just an increased risk of harm. The bill exempts rules required by federal law for state permitting authority, site-specific rules required by state law, rules that are less strict than or equivalent to federal standards, rules that loosen existing requirements, and emergency rules. This measure ties Utah's ability to adopt environmental and waste-management standards more closely to federal benchmarks and to a defined scientific evidentiary standard, potentially affecting future state rules that would otherwise go beyond federal minimums.