The Environmental Protection Agency is taking a major step toward changing its math to favor polluters over people: It’s going to stop tallying up the dollar value of lives saved and hospital visits avoided by air pollution regulations.
Instead, the agency will consider the effects of regulations without attaching a price tag to human life.
In particular, the EPA is changing how it conducts the cost-benefit analysis of regulations for two major pollutants, fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns — usually referred to as PM2.5 — and ozone. The change was buried in a document published this month analyzing the economic impacts of final pollution regulations for power plants, arguing that the way the EPA historically calculated the economic benefits of regulations had too much uncertainty and gave people “a false sense of precision.”
So to fix this, the EPA will stop tabulating the benefits altogether “until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
The news was first reported by the New York Times. On X, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin pushed back on the reporting, calling it “another dishonest, fake news claim” and that the agency is still considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.
I spoke with several experts, including former EPA officials, and in fact, the change could lead to worsening air quality and harm public health.
The EPA exists to regulate pollution that harms people, and when it comes to things like ozone and tiny particles, there is robust evidence of the damage they can do, contributing to heart attacks and asthma attacks. Measured over populations, air pollution takes years off of people’s lives. Every year in the United States alone, air pollution pushes 135,000 people into early graves.
“There is a lot of science that shows very clearly that being exposed to increasing levels of PM2.5 has significant health impacts,” said Janet McCabe, who served as the EPA’s deputy administrator under President Joe Biden.
What happens when you add up the costs without the benefits?
Anytime the EPA wants to issue a new regulation — say, revising how much mercury a power plant is allowed to emit — it looks at both the costs and the benefits before finalizing the rule. The EPA adds up how much companies would likely have to spend on things like installing upgraded scrubbers in smokestacks. Then the agency estimates the economic benefit of imposing the regulation, such as more days with cleaner air or fewer workers calling out sick. The biggest benefits usually come from improving health through things like avoiding hospital visits and reducing early deaths.
There is some fuzziness in the numbers on both sides of the ledger though. If a bunch of companies turn to a handful of suppliers for pollution control equipment, that could drive up compliance costs. And how exactly do you price a hypothetical emergency room trip that didn’t happen?
“In my experience at EPA, there’s never a perfect estimate of costs or benefits,” McCabe said. Yet even with imperfect calculations, regulators could get a decent sense of whether the juice was worth the squeeze when it comes to a new pollution standard, and the public would get a window into how the decision was made.
Under the Biden administration, the EPA found that enforcing the more stringent PM2.5 regulations it issued in 2024 would add up to $46 billion in health benefits by 2032, vastly more than the cost of complying with the rule.
The EPA now effectively wants to put receipts from the benefits side of the ledger through the shredder.
In theory, the EPA could still include the number of lives saved in how it considers the upside of a regulation without attaching a dollar value to it. But experts say that in practice, leaving the dollar costs of compliance in the equation and ignoring the economic value of the health benefits will likely skew the balance toward less regulation.
“You’re not able to compare the cost to the benefits unless you’re talking apples-to-apples, or in this case dollars-to-dollars,” said Christa Hasenkopf, director of the Clean Air Program at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.
This change in math is part of a broader pattern at the EPA — and across the federal government — of just measuring and counting fewer things under the second Trump Administration. The EPA has already closed its Office of Research and Development, which was meant to provide the scientific basis for environmental regulations, like tracking the effects of toxic chemicals on the human body.
With less data on science and economics, agencies like the EPA have less accountability for their actions as they face more pressure from the White House to cut regulations and craft policies benefiting politically favored industries. It also sets the stage for taking the teeth out of other regulations, like the Clean Air Act. The EPA has already dismantled its legal foundation for addressing climate change.
Joseph Goffman, who served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s air and radiation office under Biden, said this change in how the EPA calculates health benefits is part of a broader campaign against air pollution regulations.
“It really illustrates what the ulterior motive is and that is to mute or mask the true impact of [particulate matter] exposure and the huge benefits that flow from reducing it,” Goffman said. “Suddenly deciding that you can’t ascribe a dollar value to reducing PM really is convenient to the point of being instrumental to Zeldin’s efforts to weaken PM standards.”
If the EPA never comes up with a new way to monetize the health benefits of regulations, it’s likely that improvements in air quality will stall, and air pollution could get worse.
“One would anticipate that we could see PM 2.5 levels rising across the country,” Hasenkopf said.
