The Trump administration plans to stop calculating the monetary value of the public health benefits from reducing air pollution and instead focus exclusively on the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, the New York Times reported Monday.
Intragency emails and other documents reviewed by the Times revealed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is planning to stop tallying the financial value of health benefits caused by limiting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone when regulating polluting industries.
Research published in 2023 showed that PM2.5 pollution from coal-fired power plants alone killed approximately 460,000 people in the US from 1999 to 2020.
“This policy will cause more deaths of vulnerable Americans, like infants and the elderly,” American University School of Public Affairs professor Claudia Persico said on X Monday. “Also, it appears to be a violation of the Clean Air Act. This is incredibly foolish.”
The EPA proposal would mark a stark reversal of decades of policy under which the agency cited the estimated cost of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to support stronger clean air rules. The change is likely to make it easier to roll back limits on PM2.5 and ozone from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and other polluting facilities.
“The idea that EPA would not consider the public health benefits of its regulations is anathema to the very mission of EPA,” Richard Revesz, faculty director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law, told the Times.
“If you’re only considering the costs to industry and you’re ignoring the benefits, then you can’t justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that EPA was set up,” Revesz added.
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The Environmental Protection Network (EPN), an advocacy group, said in a statement Monday that “EPA’s reported decision to ignore prevented deaths is part of a pattern of ignoring or downplaying health effects in the rulemaking process, including in its rulemaking on effluent guidelines for coal-fired power plants and its recent Waters of the United States rulemaking.”
Critics of President Donald Trump’s policies accuse his administration of repeatedly putting polluters—who contributed hundreds of millions of dollars toward reelecting the president and supporting other Republicans—over people.
“EPA should strengthen how it values human life and health, not pretend it doesn’t matter,” Katie Tracy, senior regulatory policy advocate at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said Monday. “By refusing to monetize the benefits of cleaner air, the agency is effectively saying that preventing asthma attacks, heart disease, and early deaths have no dollar value at all.”
“This unconscionable decision by the EPA should be called out for what it really is—a favor to corporate interests at the expense of the environment and public health,” Tracy added. "EPA’s decision is not only shocking—it’s illegal and violates the Supreme Court’s instruction that the government cannot stack the deck to benefit polluters. Accordingly, if this disturbing policy leads to regulatory repeals or weak standards, it will certainly be challenged in court.”
During Trump’s second term, the EPA has moved to repeal or replace the stronger carbon emission limits on fossil-fueled power plants put in place by the Biden administration, rescinded Biden-era fuel efficiency and emissions standards for cars and light trucks, revoked California’s ability to enact stricter vehicle emissions rules, and signaled plans to overturn the agency’s finding that greenhouse gases are a public health hazard.
The EPA has also weakened water and wetland protections, rolled back regulations limiting so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water, dramatically cut or eliminated environmental justice programs, reduced enforcement of environmental violations, dismantled long-standing advisory and scientific panels, removed all mentions of human-caused climate change from its website, and more.
According to a 2024 EPN analysis, Trump’s rollbacks could cause the deaths of nearly 200,000 people in the United States by 2050.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin—a former Republican congressman from New York with an abysmal 14% lifetime rating from the League of Conservation Voters—has also boasted about canceling around $20 billion worth of Biden-era green grants.
“EPA’s current leadership has abandoned EPA’s mission to protect human health and safety,” EPN senior adviser Jeremy Symons said Monday. “Human lives don’t count. Childhood asthma doesn’t count. It is a shameful abdication of EPA’s responsibility to protect Americans from harm. Under this administration, the Environmental Protection Agency is now the Environmental Pollution Agency, helping polluters at the expense of human health.”
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