The EPA has long considered the health benefits from air pollution rules. That’s changing : NPR

Steam and pollution emerge from a Wyoming coal-fired power plant. President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is taking a new approach to regulating air pollution. Unlike its previous policy, EPA will not place a monetary value on the potential health benefits of the regulations. Critics say this could make it easier to repeal the regulations.

J. David Ake/AP

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J. David Ake/AP

For years, the Environmental Protection Agency has placed a monetary value on the lives saved and health problems avoided through many of its environmental regulations.

Now that has changed. The EPA will no longer consider the economic cost of harm caused to human health by fine particulate matter and ozone, two air pollutants known to affect human health. The change was written into a new rule recently published by the agency. It relaxed air pollution rules on power plant turbines that burn fossil fuels, which are sources of air pollution of many types, including those from fine particulate matter, sometimes called soot.

The EPA writes in its regulatory impact analysis of the new rule that, at this time, the agency will not consider the monetary value of the health benefits of its fine particulate matter and ozone regulations because there is too much uncertainty in the estimates of these economic impacts.

EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch clarified that the agency is still considering health benefits. But it won’t assign an amount to those benefits until further notice as it reconsiders how it evaluates those numbers.

Health experts fear the move could lead to a rollback of air pollution rules, which could lead to higher pollution levels, leading to more health risks for millions of Americans.

“I worry about what this could mean for health,” says Mary Rice, a pulmonologist and air pollution expert at Harvard University and director of Harvard’s Center for Climate Health and the Global Environment. “Particularly for people with chronic respiratory diseases like asthma and COPD, for children whose lungs are still developing and for older people, who are particularly susceptible to the harmful effects of air pollution on the heart, lungs and brain.”

Fine particles, called PM2.5, come from a variety of sources, including power plants that burn fossil fuels like coal and gas. Long-term exposure to fine particle pollution is known to cause significant health risks, ranging from higher rates of asthma to more heart attacks, dementia and even premature death. According to the agency’s previous estimates, cleaning up fine particle pollution has saved more than 230,000 lives and billions of dollars annually in recent years.

This policy shift could facilitate a further rollback of air pollution regulations, says Richard Revesz, an environmental law expert at NYU. The economic costs to the industry of implementing aviation regulations are still quantified, at least in the new rule. But if benefits don’t come with an equally concrete amount, he says, it’s easier to ignore them. “It only seems good because you ignore the main consequence of the decline, which is the additional negative impact on public health,” he says. “Just saying we assume there’s no harm, that doesn’t mean there’s no harm.”

The health costs of air pollution

Decades of research have shown that exposure to pollution, such as fine particles, harms health. Harvard University’s landmark Six Cities study, conducted from the 1970s to the 1990s, showed unambiguously that living in more polluted areas shortened people’s lives. Since then, hundreds of research analyses, many by EPA scientists, have linked risks to people’s lungs, hearts and brains to fine particle pollution. And reducing this pollution can have almost instantaneous beneficial effects on health: after the closure of a polluting coke plant in Pennsylvania, for example, cardiovascular and respiratory problems considerably decreased among the surrounding population.

A 1981 executive order from President Ronald Reagan required agencies like the EPA to examine the costs and benefits of major regulations like the Clean Air Act. So, as the evidence on the health risks of exposure to air pollution evolved, the EPA began to think about how to assess both.

The cost estimates were relatively simple: How much would it cost the industry to upgrade its equipment and processes to comply with a rule? The benefits were slightly trickier. The agency has developed sophisticated methods to estimate how many lives would be saved and how many health problems could be avoided with less pollution, through stricter regulations. The EPA has also developed economic models to estimate how much money such changes would save the American people.

Most estimates consistently result in high economic benefit-to-cost ratios, says Rice, the Harvard pulmonologist. “The Clean Air Act is often cited as having benefit-cost ratios greater than 30 to 1,” she says. “The economic return is so large that even small reductions in pollution, affecting millions of people, result in very significant savings.”

A 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case clarified that agencies like the EPA must consider both benefits and costs in their regulatory processes. But the courts “have not addressed the question of how exactly [EPA] “So, yes, they have to take both into account, but there is no legally binding obligation for them to do it in any particular way,” he says. That leaves it up to the agency’s discretion, Holmstead says, whether to waive a economic calculation of benefits, as long as the EPA still evaluates health benefits in some way.

Other EPA regulations, he says, assess health benefits without assigning a specific monetary value, such as some rules regarding hazardous air pollutants, which are associated with significant but more uncertain health risks.

However, “you can’t do a sophisticated cost-benefit analysis without trying to monetize both the costs and the benefits,” says Holmstead. “This will be the first time in a long time that the EPA is not trying to provide a monetary benefit by reducing at least PM 2.5 and ozone.”

The decision not to consider economic benefits marks a major policy shift, says Revesz, a legal expert at NYU. “It’s extraordinarily unusual,” he said.

Not just air pollution

Revesz points out that under the Trump administration, the EPA has also taken steps to reconsider the economic benefits of regulations in other areas.

In its proposal to lower vehicle emissions standards, for example, the EPA failed to evaluate the potential economic benefits to consumers who opted for electric vehicles instead of choosing gasoline-powered cars. He also explicitly refused to calculate the societal economic benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and significantly lowered estimates of health savings resulting from stricter rules. The EPA did the same in its effort to rescind the hazard finding, in effect since 2009. That finding concludes that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere poses serious risks to public health and welfare.

Revesz says that makes three ways the EPA has used to consider the economic benefits of the regulations for Americans. And now, “the EPA has said it’s going to ignore all three of them,” he says.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a 2025 statement that his priorities at the agency were “reducing the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.”