(WASHINGTON) — More than two dozen Senate Democrats are launching an independent investigation into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a rule change on how the agency calculates the health benefits from curbing air pollution.
The EPA wrote in its regulatory impact analysis last month that it would no longer apply a dollar value to the health benefits that result from its regulations for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone because the agency says there’s too much uncertainty in the estimates. In the past, the EPA calculated a dollar value based on the health benefits of reducing air pollution, which included the number of premature deaths and illnesses avoided, such as asthma attacks.
The senators described the new policy as “irrational” and said it will lead to the EPA rejecting actions that would impose “relatively minor costs” on polluting industries that could result in “massive benefits” to public health, according to a letter sent to the EPA on Thursday and obtained by ABC News.
“The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President Trump’s largest donors,” the senators wrote.
Led by Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Ranking Member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the senators are requesting documents and information about how EPA made this determination by Feb. 26.
The decision to not quantify the health benefits of environmental regulations is “completely unsupported” and “a very stark departure” from the way the EPA has worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations over the last several decades, said Richard L. Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in environmental and regulatory law and policy.
The regulatory impact analysis does not cite any science or economics and did not allow for public comments, Revesz told ABC News. The approach was also not submitted to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, “which is standard,” nor was it submitted for peer review, he added.
“Each of those things are necessary elements for changing scientific policies like this, and EPA violated every single one of them,” Revesz said.
Senate democrats are seeking the basis on which the EPA made the decision; what the EPA willl take into account when undertaking Clean Air Act rulemaking; whether the EPA has discussed ceasing to quantify health effects of other pollutants; and whether the EPA consulted with any third parties, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Surgeon General, public health experts and interested civil society groups.
It was industry executives who pushed for benefit-cost analysis during Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, said Janet McCabe, visiting professor at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law and former deputy administrator of the EPA between 2021 and 2024. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which instructs each agency to perform rigorous cost benefit analysis for any rule or regulation to be implemented.
“There’s a whole field of environmental economics where models and analytical methods and data collection have evolved on both the cost and the benefit side to help decision-makers and the public understand,” McCabe told ABC News.
While the EPA points to uncertainties in the estimates, assigning a number to monetize health benefits is “very defensible” because of the vast number of studies that allow economists to estimate ranges of health impacts in terms of monetary value, McCabe said.
In the past, when the EPA felt like it could not rigorously assign a number to either cost or health benefit, “it would say so,” McCabe said.
The EPA has received the letter and will respond through the proper channels, an EPA spokesperson told ABC News.
PM2.5 and ozone — soot and smog — are two of the most dangerous and widespread pollutants in the U.S., according to health and environmental policy experts. They are produced by a number of sources, including emissions from vehicles, power plants, the agriculture industry and oil refineries.
The agency is still considering the impacts that fine particulate matter and ozone emissions have on human health, like it “always has,” but that it will not be monetizing the impacts “at this time,” an EPA spokesperson told ABC News last month.
“EPA is fully committed to its core mission of protecting human health and the environment by relying on gold standard science, not the approval of so-called environmental groups that are funded by far-left activists,” the EPA spokesperson said.
The new EPA rule could prove dangerous to human health in the future because it will make it easier for the Trump administration to weaken air pollution controls, the experts who spoke with ABC News said. The EPA will only have the cost to industry to consider when making policy decisions without factoring in the benefits to health, the experts said.
“There will be nothing on the health side to balance them,” McCabe said. “That will make rules much easier to justify from a cost benefit perspective, because all you will see is the costs.”
In its regulatory impact analysis published in January 2024, the EPA calculated the benefit avoided morbidities and premature death in the year 2032 as worth between $22 billion and $46 billion. In February 2024, when the EPA tightened the amount of PM2.5 that could be emitted by industrial facilities, it estimated that the rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths by 2032.
This data will no longer be considered under the new rule.
“It’s not even estimating how many deaths that is, even though the models for doing both things have been very well established for a long, long time,” Revesz said.
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