EPA and Air Pollution Policy

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump has issued a new rule and regulatory impact analysis stating it will no longer assign dollar values to the health benefits of reducing fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone when evaluating certain air‑pollution rules, starting with weakened standards for fossil‑fuel power‑plant turbines. EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch says the agency will still consider health impacts qualitatively but is suspending monetized estimates while it rethinks its methodology, citing uncertainty in economic projections. Health experts note decades of research — including EPA’s own past work — link PM2.5 and ozone to asthma, heart attacks, dementia and premature death, and prior EPA analyses credited PM2.5 cleanup with saving more than 230,000 lives and billions of dollars annually. Legal scholar Richard Revesz warns that keeping industry compliance costs fully quantified while stripping dollar amounts from health benefits tilts cost–benefit analyses toward rollbacks by making public‑health harms easier to discount. The move marks a significant shift in federal environmental economics that could undercut future air‑quality protections for vulnerable groups such as children, older adults and people with chronic lung or heart disease.