EPA drops health-benefit calculations from air pollution rules under Trump

The change shifts the regulatory calculus for future air pollution rules to focus exclusively on compliance costs to industry, and comes as the Trump administration simultaneously moves to weaken a Biden-era soot standard and issues a less-restrictive nitrogen oxide rule for gas-burning power plants.

The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday it will stop calculating the monetary value of lives saved and health care costs avoided when setting standards for fine particulate matter and ozone, ending a decades-long practice used by administrations of both parties to justify clean-air rules.

EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said the agency “will not be monetizing the impacts at this time.” The agency said it “absolutely remains committed to our core mission of protecting human health and the environment” and will continue estimating compliance costs to businesses.

Environmental and public health advocates said the move would remove a critical tool for gauging whether air pollution rules are worth their cost — and could expose communities to greater health risks as the agency simultaneously loosens restrictions on two major classes of industrial emissions.

A decades-long practice abandoned

Since EPA’s creation more than 50 years ago, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have used monetary estimates to assign dollar value to a human life in cost-benefit analyses of pollution rules. The methodology underpinned some of the agency’s most significant regulatory actions.

Under President Joe Biden, EPA estimated that its proposed rule on PM2.5 — fine particulate matter from tailpipes, smokestacks, and other industrial sources — would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays by 2032. The agency said that for every $1 spent on reducing PM2.5, there could be as much as $77 in health benefits.

The Trump administration contends those estimates mislead the public. By presenting specific figures without ranges or qualifying statements, the EPA said in an economic impact analysis, the agency “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.” The agency said it would stop monetizing benefits until it is “confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”

“Not monetizing DOES NOT equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact,” Hirsch said.

New NOx rule also issued Monday

Alongside the methodology announcement, EPA on Monday issued a final rule revising emission limits for nitrogen oxide pollution from new gas-burning turbines used in power plants. The final rule is substantially less restrictive than the proposal issued under the Biden administration; for some gas plants, it weakens protections that have been in place for two decades.

The new nitrogen oxide rule does not estimate the economic value of health benefits from reducing that pollutant or other air pollution under the Clean Air Act. Nitrogen oxide emissions form smog and soot linked to heart disease, asthma, and other lung conditions.

The change in how EPA calculates health benefits was first reported by The New York Times.

Critics warn of broad regulatory consequences

Environmental lawyers and regulatory economists said removing health-benefit monetization would not only affect current rules but could erode the legal and analytical foundation of environmental regulation more broadly.

“The EPA’s mandate is to protect public health, not to ignore the science in order to eliminate clean air safeguards that save lives,” said John Walke, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He called the methodology change “reckless, dangerous, and illegal,” adding: “By pretending real health benefits do not count, EPA wants to open the door for industry to foul the air, while communities and families pay the price in asthma attacks, heart disease and premature deaths.”

W. Kip Viscusi, a Vanderbilt Law School professor who helped develop the government’s method of monetizing health risks more than four decades ago, said that if EPA stops using statistics to measure risks to human life, “it will undermine the rationale for all health, safety and environmental regulations.” He said the air regulations being targeted “account for a dominant share of the mortality benefits of recent EPA regulations,” and called the administration’s use of a zero value for expected lives saved “unprecedented.”

Noha Haggag, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the EPA under the Trump administration “recklessly refuses to place any value on protecting the health of millions of Americans from nitrogen oxides pollution in the face of mountains of medical science finding that this pollution contributes to asthma attacks, heart disease and other serious health problems.”

Part of a broader regulatory shift

The methodology change accompanies the Trump administration’s effort to abandon a Biden-era rule that tightened standards for PM2.5 soot. In a court filing in November, EPA argued the Biden rule was done “without the rigorous, stepwise process that Congress required” and was therefore unlawful.

EPA said the United States has made substantial progress in reducing PM2.5 and ozone concentrations since 2000, and that it “absolutely remains committed” to its public health mission. The agency said it recognizes the “clear and well-documented benefits” of reducing fine particulate matter and ozone, and that its ongoing work to refine economic methodologies of pollution rules would continue.