The Environmental Protection Agency said it will stop calculating the dollar value of health care costs avoided and deaths prevented from air pollution rules that curb fine particulate matter and ozone, shifting the agency’s approach to how it weighs benefits in regulatory analyses.
The change means the EPA will focus its analyses of the PM2.5 and ozone rules on the cost to industry, according to the EPA’s statement late Monday, while it continues estimating costs for businesses required to comply with the rules.
In that statement, the agency said, “absolutely remains committed to our core mission of protecting human health and the environment” but “will not be monetizing the impacts at this time.” The EPA’s spokeswoman, Brigit Hirsch, said the agency would continue “ongoing work to refine its economic methodologies” for pollution rules.
Environmental and public health advocates criticized the decision as a retreat from the health-protection mission. John Walke, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the EPA’s mandate is to protect public health, not to “ignore the science in order to eliminate clean air safeguards that save lives.’’ He added that the change in how public health benefits are calculated was “reckless, dangerous, and illegal,” arguing the agency was opening a door for industry to pollute while “communities and families pay the price in asthma attacks, heart disease and premature deaths.”
The EPA’s move follows reporting first attributed to The New York Times about the shift in calculating monetized benefits, and it is described as part of a broader realignment under President Donald Trump toward a business-friendly approach.
The EPA’s new stance comes as the Trump administration has sought to abandon a rule setting tougher standards for deadly soot pollution, arguing the Biden administration lacked authority to set the tighter standard for emissions from tailpipes, smokestacks and other industrial sources. In a court filing in November, the EPA said the Biden-era rule was completed “without the rigorous, stepwise process that Congress required” and was therefore unlawful.
Even with the change, the EPA said it continues to recognize the “clear and well-documented benefits” of reducing PM2.5 and ozone. Hirsch said in an emailed statement that “Not monetizing DOES NOT equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact,” and said the agency under Administrator Lee Zeldin remains committed to protecting human health.
The EPA said earlier approaches had used different estimates for placing monetary value on a human life in cost-benefit analyses across Republican and Democratic administrations. Under former President Joe Biden, the agency estimated that its proposed PM2.5 rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays by 2032, and said that for every $1 spent reducing PM2.5, there could be as much as $77 in health benefits.
The Trump administration contends those estimates can mislead the public. In an economic impact analysis for a new NOx rule, the EPA said its use of specific estimates “leads the public to believe the Agency has a better understanding of the monetized impacts of exposure to PM2.5 and ozone than in reality,” and said it would rectify that by no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone while continuing to quantify emissions until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.
Critics said the change heightens health risks. They pointed to a final EPA rule issued Monday that revises emission limits for nitrogen oxide, or NOx, from new gas-burning turbines used in power plants as evidence of the problems with the new approach. Nitrogen oxide emissions can contribute to smog and soot linked to serious heart and lung diseases, and the EPA’s final NOx rule is described as substantially less restrictive than a Biden administration proposal, weakening protections in place for two decades for some gas plants, according to the report.
Critics also said the NOx rule does not estimate the economic value of health benefits from reducing NOx and other types of air pollution under the Clean Air Act, and they argued that this means the agency will ignore the economic value of “lives saved, hospital visits avoided and lost work and school days prevented.” Noha Haggag, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the EPA “recklessly refuses to place any value on protecting the health of millions of Americans from nitrogen oxides pollution” in the face of medical science linking the pollution to “asthma attacks, heart disease and other serious health problems.”
W. Kip Viscusi, a Vanderbilt Law School professor who helped develop a government system for monetizing health risks more than four decades ago, said in an email that if the EPA stops using statistics to measure risks to human life, it would undermine the rationale for health, safety and environmental regulations. Viscusi also said the targeted air regulations account for a dominant share of the mortality benefits of recent EPA regulations, and he called the administration’s use of a zero value for expected lives saved “unprecedented.”