The Environmental Protection Agency has established a new way to address the country’s pollution problems: Ignore them.
For several decades, the agency has used the best available science to quantify the benefits from regulations that reduce air pollution: averted deaths, hospitalizations, asthma symptoms, heart attacks and strokes, among them. The E.P.A. assigned those health benefits dollar values based on economic models and compared them with the costs imposed on businesses for cutting their pollution. The figures allowed you to see clearly whether a particular regulation was worth it or not. Most were very much worth it.
This evenhanded approach came to a halt two weeks ago, when the agency weakened a proposal to regulate emissions from certain power plants and other industrial facilities. The new, nihilistic E.P.A. position is that environmental safeguards have essentially no benefits. People with asthma who’ve experienced improvements in their health from cleaner air know this isn’t true, but our government will now pretend otherwise.
In 2024, the E.P.A. strengthened its standard for concentrations in the air of fine particulate matter, which includes soot, and determined that the regulation would provide $46 billion of yearly benefits — resulting largely from 4,500 averted premature deaths and 800,000 fewer cases of asthma symptoms. This was as much as 77 times the annual cost of the regulation to companies.
If the E.P.A. proceeds with its plan to repeal this regulation, it will do so without any consideration of the costs to human health. Instead, the agency will compare the hundreds of millions of dollars of savings for polluters with the number of tons of additional emissions. Health experts foresee the new practice resulting in higher asthma rates, more heart attacks and more dementia — as well as more premature deaths.
The E.P.A. administrator, Lee Zeldin, insisted that the agency “will still be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.” But the wording of the E.P.A.’s new power plant rule contradicts this claim by calling into question the relationship between pollution concentrations and negative health consequences. Either Mr. Zeldin does not know what his agency did or he is trying to mislead the public.
If the E.P.A. now believes that the methods used to determine health outcomes inadequately considered uncertainties, as it says it does, or that advances in science and economics justify a change, the agency is entitled to consider new approaches and submit them for peer review and public comment. The agency has also historically asked its Science Advisory Board to review such changes.
Instead, the E.P.A. made a consequential policy decision that was not supported by scientific or economic data and without expert or public input. Presumably it did so to avoid getting panned by respected scientific organizations, which had strongly criticized the agency’s proposed repeal of the finding that greenhouse gases “endanger public health or welfare” — a proposal largely based on a flimsy, unreviewed report by a group of climate skeptics.
Following a similar playbook, in its proposed repeal of the greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles, the E.P.A. assigned no value at all to greenhouse gas reductions; the repeal’s negative consequences are more than $150 billion per year. The agency also walked away from its approach for estimating the benefits of more fuel-efficient vehicles. The E.P.A. calls those benefits into question by speculating that, as a result of fuel efficiency standards, consumers might not get some features, like increased acceleration, that they would otherwise value. As a result of its pet theory, the agency condemns Americans to significant additional financial costs from driving vehicles.
The Trump administration’s actions are unlikely to survive in court. A federal appeals court ruled that uncertainty over the value of an environmental benefit is not a reason to assign it a value of zero, as the E.P.A. has done for reductions in soot.
Further, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that a regulation that “does significantly more harm than good” isn’t allowed. The E.P.A. cannot meet this standard by ignoring the harms of its deregulatory actions.
And the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the judicial review of agency action, requires agencies to submit for public comment the analytical approaches that underpin its regulatory actions, a step the E.P.A. has skipped.
Even if the E.P.A.’s misguided new policies are eventually struck down, the resulting damage will be considerable. Investments in clean technologies, including electric vehicles, are slowing now that businesses aren’t required to meet as many regulatory standards. That means we will have to bear pollution in the future that otherwise would have been averted.
The Trump administration is also unlikely to enforce standards that it sought to weaken or repeal — it has already granted waivers of existing pollution standards right and left. Environmental nihilism therefore will prevail for at least several years. In the meantime, average Americans could experience significant hits to their health and their pocketbooks.
Richard L. Revesz, the AnBryce professor of law and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law, was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2023 to 2025.
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