The Environmental Protection Agency says it will stop calculating how much money is saved in healthcare costs avoided and deaths prevented from air pollution rules that curb two deadly pollutants.
The change means the EPA will focus rules for fine particulate matter and ozone only on the cost to industry, part of a broader realignment under Donald Trump toward a business-friendly approach that has included the rollback of multiple policies meant to safeguard human health and the environment and slow climate change.
The agency said in a statement late on Monday that it “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 will continue to estimate costs to businesses to comply with the rules and will continue “ongoing work to refine its economic methodologies” of pollution rules, spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said.
Environmental and public health advocates called the agency’s action a dangerous abdication of one of its core missions.
“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 change in how public health benefits are calculated “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.”
The change in how the EPA calculates health benefits was first reported by the New York Times.
The move comes as the Trump administration is seeking to abandon a rule that sets tough standards for deadly soot pollution, arguing that the Biden administration did not have authority to set the tighter standard on pollution from tailpipes, smokestacks and other industrial sources.
In a court filing in November, the EPA said the Biden-era rule was done “without the rigorous, stepwise process that Congress required” and was therefore unlawful.
The EPA said it continued to recognize the “clear and well-documented benefits” of reducing fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, and ozone.
“Not monetizing DOES NOT equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact,” Hirsch said in an emailed statement, saying the agency under its administrator, Lee Zeldin, remains committed to protecting human health.
Since the EPA’s creation more than 50 years ago, Republican and Democratic administrations have used different estimates to assign monetary value to a human life in cost-benefit analyses.
Under Biden, the EPA estimated that its proposed rule on PM2.5 would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays by 2032. For every $1 spent on reducing PM2.5, the agency said, there could be as much as $77 in health benefits.
But the Trump administration contends that these estimates are misleading. By failing to include ranges or other qualifying statements, the EPA’s use of an estimate “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 in an economic impact analysis for the new rule.
“Therefore, to rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone but will continue to quantify the emissions until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
The United States had made substantial progress in reducing PM2.5 and ozone concentrations since 2000, the agency said.
But, critics said, a new EPA rule that revises emission limits for dangerous nitrogen oxide pollution from new gas-burning turbines used in power plants demonstrates the risks of the new approach.
Emissions of nitrogen oxide, also known as NOx, form smog and soot that is harmful to human health and linked to serious heart and lung diseases. The EPA’s final NOx rule, issued on Monday, is substantially less restrictive than a proposal under the Biden administration. For some gas plants, the rule weakens protections in place for two decades.
The new rule does not estimate the economic value of health benefits from reducing NOx and other types of air pollution under the Clean Air Act. Critics said the change meant the EPA will ignore the economic value of lives saved, hospital visits avoided and lost work and school days prevented.
Under Trump, the EPA “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”, said Noha Haggag, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund, another environmental group.
