The Environmental Protection Agency is making a major change in how it decides pollution rules, and it could have serious effects on air quality and public health.
Under President Donald Trump’s administration, the EPA plans to stop counting the health benefits of cleaner air when setting new regulations.
Instead, the agency will only measure how much pollution limits cost businesses.
This marks a big shift from the agency’s long-standing approach.
For decades, both Democratic and Republican administrations weighed both the costs to companies and the financial value of saving lives and preventing illness.
That included estimating how much money society saved by avoiding things like asthma attacks, missed workdays, and premature deaths from pollution.
But not anymore. Internal emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times reveal that the EPA will stop assigning a dollar value to health gains from reducing two major pollutants: fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone.
These changes are expected to make it easier to weaken or eliminate pollution limits for power plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and other heavy industries.
What’s Changing and Why It Matters
PM2.5 refers to extremely tiny particles, smaller than 2.5 micrometers wide, that can enter the lungs and even the bloodstream.
Ozone is a gas that forms on hot days when emissions from vehicles and factories mix in the air.
Both pollutants have been strongly linked to serious health issues like asthma, heart and lung disease, and early death.
The Biden administration had taken a different approach; it issued tighter limits on PM2.5 pollution, estimating that the rule could prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays in the year 2032 alone.
The EPA at the time said that for every $1 spent on reducing PM2.5, Americans could gain up to $77 in health benefits.
However, under Trump, EPA officials now say those benefits are too uncertain to rely on.
In a Dec. 11 email obtained by The Times, an agency supervisor wrote that political appointees in the Office of Air and Radiation plan to add language to all new rules stating that earlier analyses gave the public “false precision and confidence” in health-related benefits.
“To rectify this error, the E.P.A. is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone,” the internal email said.
EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran confirmed the change. “E.P.A., like the agency always has, is still considering the impacts that PM2.5 and ozone emissions have on human health,” she said in an email.
“Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact.”
Industry-Friendly Shift Raises Questions
The move is expected to please many in the business community.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has long argued that the government gives too much weight to the benefits of reducing PM2.5 when setting other pollution limits.
Neil Bradley, a top official at the Chamber, wrote in 2018 that the EPA needed to be more honest about the “uncertainty in cost and benefit estimates, particularly with respect to health benefits estimates.”
Aaron Szabo, the head of the EPA’s air and radiation office, is overseeing the change.
At his Senate confirmation hearing, Szabo noted that he has cystic fibrosis, saying, “Because of my lung disease, I have always been acutely aware of air quality.”
However, Szabo previously worked as a registered lobbyist for the oil and chemical industries, including the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which has opposed stricter air pollution rules.
Environmental law experts are alarmed. Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law and former head of a key regulatory office under President Joe Biden, said, “The idea that E.P.A. would not consider the public health benefits of its regulations is anathema to the very mission of E.P.A.”
“If you’re only considering the costs to industry and you’re ignoring the benefits,” Revesz added, “then you can’t justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that E.P.A. was set up.”
Legal and Climate Implications
The change may not go unchallenged. Legal experts say it could conflict with a 2015 Supreme Court decision, Michigan v. EPA, in which Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that if a federal agency considers a regulation’s benefits, it must also consider its costs, and vice versa.
Ignoring one side could make future rollbacks easier to challenge in court.
This is also part of a broader Trump administration strategy to scale back environmental protections.
In 2025, the White House instructed agencies to stop using estimates of the economic damage from climate change, a move that sidelined the “social cost of carbon,” a key metric used to justify stricter emissions rules.
Critics say the EPA’s new approach prioritizes industry profits at the expense of public health.
And while the agency insists it still values human health, dropping dollar values from the equation could reduce the strength of future pollution rules, especially when challenged by well-funded industry groups.
As the rulemaking process unfolds, legal battles are expected, and the future of U.S. air quality may hang in the balance.