The Trump Environmental Protection Agency just decided to no longer inflate the monetized benefits of EPA air quality regulations with imaginary deaths prevented. This has put the greens into orbit. [some emphasis, links added]
The New York Times headline blared “EPA to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution.” The article continues: “In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits, and not the monetary value of saving human lives, documents show.”
EPA chief Lee Zeldin responded on X: “Yet another dishonest, fake news claim courtesy of the New York Times. Not only is the EXACT OPPOSITE of this headline the actual truth, but the Times is already VERY WELL AWARE that EPA will still be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits. The Times’ unyielding commitment to destroying journalism is second to none.”
Yet another dishonest, fake news claim courtesy of the New York Times.
Not only is the EXACT OPPOSITE of this headline the actual truth, but the Times is already VERY WELL AWARE that EPA will still be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits. The Times’ unyielding… pic.twitter.com/9jlhK0uz7u
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) January 12, 2026
What is going on?
The evaluation of a proposed rule’s costs and benefits has been a common-sense administrative requirement before setting new regulations since the Reagan administration.
Until the Clinton administration, so-called cost-benefit analysis was an effective tool in stopping costly overregulation, particularly at the EPA.
But the Clinton EPA figured out how to game the cost-benefit analysis process in order to issue its most expensive regulations – air quality rules that were eventually used by the Obama EPA to destroy half of the U.S. coal industry.
After failing in its first effort to implement an anti-fossil-fuel agenda through a “BTU tax,” the Clinton EPA moved to issue more stringent air quality standards for ozone.
The problem is that the monetized benefits of the tighter ozone standard (possibly fewer asthma attacks triggered by outdoor air) paled in comparison to the economy-wide compliance costs of the regulation (tens of billions of dollars).
The Clinton EPA’s solution was to pair the ozone proposal with another proposal to regulate, for the first time, a newly invented air pollutant called “fine particulate matter” or “PM2.5,” which is microscopic dust, soot, or pollen in outdoor air.
As described in great detail in my 2016 book “Scare Pollution,” the Clinton administration developed the false and junk science-based notion that normal levels of PM2.5 in outdoor air could cause people to die prematurely.
How did this help the ozone proposal? The EPA claimed that regulating PM2.5 would prevent 20,000 premature deaths per year. Each prevented death, the EPA claimed, provided economic benefits of $5 million.
When you multiply 20,000 premature deaths prevented by $5 million, you get $100 billion in economic benefits, which the EPA claimed would be much greater than any possible compliance costs. So the EPA’s proposed air quality rules passed the required cost-benefit test since the benefits outweighed the costs.
By the time of the Obama administration, the EPA was claiming that PM2.5 was responsible for 570,000 (i.e., about one in five) deaths per year in the U.S., and the value of preventing a premature death had risen to $9 million.
Given that the EPA determined there was no safe level of inhaling PM2.5, the cost-benefit analyses for its rules could beat back over $5 trillion in claimed compliance costs futilely spent trying to eliminate PM2.5 from the air.
The problem, though, is that the EPA’s claims were all chicanery. Both the alleged deaths caused by PM2.5 and the monetized value of a premature death were invented out of thin air.
I have been in federal court with the EPA about its scientific claims on PM2.5, where it admitted that its primary line of evidence – i.e., epidemiology data – does not in fact show that PM2.5 outdoors has killed anyone.
The EPA has also experimented on real people, including the sick and elderly, with high exposures to PM2.5. Those didn’t harm anyone either.
The monetization of premature deaths is truly bizarre. The $5 million value of a premature death avoided was derived through a type of economic research called “willingness to pay,” in which people are polled for how much they would pay for something of value.
In the case of PM2.5, the EPA nonsensically asked people how much they would be willing to pay to reduce their risk of premature death by 1-in-100,000.
Let’s say, for example, that your risk of dying prematurely is 50%. Per the results of the EPA’s survey, people would pay $50 to reduce that risk to 49.99999%. That sum multiplied by 100,000 is where the $5 million came from. EPA has arbitrarily raised the willingness-to-pay figure to $9 million per life saved.
Now let’s say you are a 99-year-old who, because of PM2.5, dies “prematurely” today instead of tomorrow, as the EPA assumes otherwise would have happened. Because you died “prematurely,” according to the EPA, PM2.5 caused an economic loss of $5 million.
Contrast that EPA fantasy with the realistic situation of a 21-year-old soldier being killed on the battlefield. The U.S. government’s standard valuation of that soldier’s life, paid out in real dollars, is $100,000.
The Trump EPA has now merely decided that it will no longer consider the monetization of imaginary PM2.5 deaths in the cost-benefit analyses of EPA air regulations.
This will ensure that air pollution regulations make sense and are not pointlessly burdensome – a welcome change after 30 years of the EPA just making things up.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and a lawyer. He posts on X @JunkScience.
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