Trump EPA rollbacks would weaken rules projected to save billions of
dollars and thousands of lives
[June 06, 2025]
By SETH BORENSTEIN, M.K. WILDEMAN, MELINA WALLING, JOSHUA A.
BICKEL and MATTHEW DALY
When the head of the Environmental Protection Agency announced a
wide-ranging rollback of environmental regulations, he said it would put
a “dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” and introduce a
“Golden Age” for the American economy.
What Lee Zeldin didn’t mention: how ending the rules could have
devastating consequences to human health.
The EPA-targeted rules could prevent an estimated 30,000 deaths and save
$275 billion each year they are in effect, according to an Associated
Press examination that included the agency’s own prior assessments as
well as a wide range of other research.
It’s by no means guaranteed that the rules will be entirely eliminated;
they can’t be changed without going through a federal rulemaking process
that can take years and requires public comment and scientific
justification.
But experts say the numbers are conservative and that even a partial
dismantling of the rules would mean more pollutants such as smog,
mercury and lead — and especially more tiny airborne particles that can
lodge in lungs and cause health problems. It would also mean higher
emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier
levels.
“More people will die,” said Cory Zigler, a professor of biostatistics
at Brown University who has studied air pollution deaths from coal-fired
power plants. “More of this type of pollution that we know kills people
will be in the air.”
What went into AP’s examination of the pollution rules
The AP set out to look at what could happen if all the rules were
eliminated, by first examining exhaustive assessments the EPA was
required to produce before the rules were approved. Though the agency’s
priorities can change as presidential administrations change, the
methods for the assessments have been largely standard since Ronald
Reagan’s presidency and are deeply rooted in peer-reviewed scientific
research.
The AP used those and eight different government and private group
databases for its estimate of financial costs, some death estimates and
analysis of pollution trends. AP performed additional analysis of
potential deaths by drawing on peer-reviewed formulas and scientific
research on the impacts of increased heat and pollution. And AP vetted
its work with multiple outside health experts, who said it is
scientifically justified, but likely an undercount.
Multiple experts say the science behind the rules is strong, and they
pointed to the rigorous process that must be followed to change them,
including requirements for public comment.
Zeldin acknowledged as much last month.
“I’m not going to prejudge outcomes with what will be a lot of
rulemaking,” Zeldin said in April.
Virtually all the benefits from the rules come from restricting the
burning of coal, oil and natural gas. The fossil fuel industry was a
heavy contributor to President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign
and Republicans overall. In announcing the proposed changes, the EPA
repeatedly cited the costs of the rules and omitted the benefits in all
but one instance.
Calculating costs and benefits is contentious
Asked for comment on the AP findings, an EPA spokesperson said the
agency’s plans would “roll back trillions in regulatory costs and hidden
‘taxes’ on U.S. families.”
“Unlike the Biden EPA attempts to regulate whole sectors of our economy
out of existence, the Trump EPA understands that we do not have to
choose between protecting our precious environment and growing our
economy,” spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said.
Scott Segal, an attorney at Bracewell LLP who represents energy and
manufacturing interests, suggested that EPA analyses under the Biden
administration emphasized worst-case scenarios, inflated health benefit
claims and missed the big-picture economic benefits of booming industry.
“If you only count lives saved by regulation, not lives harmed by
regulation, the math will always favor more regulation,” Segal said.
“This framing misses the larger point: public health isn’t just about
air quality -- it’s also about job security, housing, access to medical
care, and heating in the winter."
The EPA regulatory analyses are immense documents that numerous health
and environment researchers and former officials say are grounded in
science, not politics. For example, in January 2024, the EPA produced a
445-page analysis of tightening standards on dangerous particle
pollution that cited more than 90 different scientific publications,
along with scores of other documents. The Biden EPA presented four
different regulatory scenarios and ultimately chose one of the middle
options.
Two experts who reviewed AP’s work said the EPA documents that
underpinned the analysis were themselves conservative in their
estimates. University of Washington health and environment professors
Kristi Ebi and Howard Frumkin said that’s because EPA looked at added
heat deaths and air pollution mortality, but did not include climate
change’s expected deaths from increased infectious disease, flooding and
other disaster factors.
“This is a rigorous, compelling and much-needed analysis,'' said Frumkin,
who was appointed director of the CDC's National Center for
Environmental Health during George W. Bush's administration. ”It makes
clear that regulatory rollbacks by the Trump administration will have
major, direct consequences for health and well-being. Because of these
regulatory rollbacks and funding cuts, Americans will die needlessly."
That's a sentiment echoed by two former Republican EPA administrators,
William Reilly and Christine Todd Whitman, who served in the George Bush
and George W. Bush administrations respectively.
“This administration is endangering all of our lives — ours, our
children, our grandchildren,” said Whitman, who led EPA under George W.
Bush.
How regulations helped clear the air
A visit to Evansville, Indiana, helps show how EPA regulations have made
a difference.
The city of about 115,000 lies where the state's southwest tip meets
Kentucky at the curving Ohio River. Industry lines the banks and coal
barges float past carrying loads destined to fuel power plants.
Kirt Ethridge, 30, grew up in Evansville and still lives there. As a
child, he recalls looking down from high ground into the bowl-shaped
valley where the heart of the city lies and seeing a haze of pollution
atop it. He thought that was normal.
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A bulldozer moves coal Thursday, April 10, 2025, in Princeton, Ind.
(AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel)
 He didn’t think much of the looming
smokestacks of the coal-fired power plants and factories that ringed
the city, nor the line of inhalers waiting on a bench before he and
his classmates ran the mile. He suffered asthma attacks in class,
sometimes more than once a week, that sent him to the nurse’s
office. Once, he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
“It’s a very scary feeling, particularly as a kid,
to not be able to get enough air in your lungs,” he said, describing
it as like “breathing through a straw.”
In southwestern Indiana, coal-fired power plants
were to blame for between 19,000 and nearly 23,000 deaths from 1999
to 2020, according to work by Zigler published in the journal
Science that examined death rates among Medicare recipients and
modeled where plants' pollution would spread.
Nationally, he and his team found a sharp decline in air pollution
deaths from coal-fired power plants after the mid-2000s, from an
average of 43,000 a year to just 1,600 a year in 2020, with a
similar cut in particle pollution. That's when two different forces
came into play: Cheaper and less polluting natural gas pushed aside
dirtier and costlier coal, while at the same time stricter
regulations required more pollution control devices such as
scrubbers.
Duke Energy operates its biggest power plant near Evansville —
Gibson Station, which can power about 2.5 million homes. Emissions
have declined significantly as the company installed scrubbers that
pull unwanted chemicals out of smokestacks, along with other
pollution control technology. Duke Energy spokeswoman Angeline
Protegere said the scrubbers were a response to “regulations over
the years as well as market factors.”
Put simply, the air got cleaner around places like Evansville.
Vanderburgh County and neighboring counties violated national annual
air standards for fine particles from 2005 to 2010, but no longer
do, even as standards have tightened.
The same is true across the United States. The amount of tiny
airborne particles in the last 10 years nationwide is one-third
lower than 2000-2009, EPA statistics show. Smog pollution is down
nearly 15% and sulfur dioxide has plunged 80%.
“The Clean Air Act, the EPA’s founding legislation, has been a
powerful engine for improving public health as our air has grown
visibly clearer and cleaner,” said Gina McCarthy, who headed the EPA
under President Barack Obama and served as Biden's White House
climate adviser. “Millions of Americans have avoided illnesses,
hospital visits, and premature deaths thanks to EPA’s cleaner car
and truck standards in concert with rules that limit industrial
pollution.”
Five rules saving more than $200 billion a year
Five rules together were estimated to have more than $200 billion a
year in net benefits, based on EPA documents that estimated reduced
illnesses and deaths and the costs for companies to comply.
Three rules dealt with cars and trucks. The “clean car rule” is a
tightening of EPA emission standards for vehicles that was supposed
to take effect for 2027 model years and eventually have annual net
benefits of more than $100 billion a year, according to the agency’s
884-page regulatory analysis. The EPA estimated that over the next
three decades this rule alone would prevent 7.9 billion tons of
heat-trapping carbon dioxide, 8,700 tons of particulate matter and
36,000 tons of nitrogen oxides.
Two other proposed rules — one that deals with car models from 2023
to 2027 and another aimed at heavy trucks and buses — are estimated
to save nearly $38 billion a year combined through reduced health
problems from air pollution, according to EPA’s own detailed
calculations.
EPA plays up costs, plays down benefits of targeted rules
Almost none of those benefits are to be found in 10 fact sheets the
EPA produced in conjunction with Zeldin's announcement. Nine make no
mention of benefits from the rules, while eight mention the costs.
In 17 of the 20 rules with explicit cost-benefit analyses, AP found
that estimated benefits are larger than the costs — and sometimes
far larger.
For example, Biden’s proposed power plant rule was designed to save
more than $24 billion a year, prevent about 3,700 annual premature
deaths and 3 million asthma incidents from fossil fuel-powered
plants, according to EPA documents last year and work by the
Environmental Protection Network. Under Trump, the EPA's fact sheet
on that rule notes nearly $1 billion in costs but nothing about the
far higher estimated benefits.
Another rule the EPA updated last year sets standards for pollution
permitted in the air, called National Ambient Air Quality Standards.
The update, required by the Clean Air Act, cuts allowable soot
particles by 25% to reflect new science on the harms from such
pollution. The EPA in Biden's time calculated the change would
annually save as much as $46 billion, 4,500 premature deaths and
800,000 asthma incidents.
But the new EPA fact sheet only mentions the estimated costs of the
change — about $614 million — and not benefits estimated at 76 times
that amount.
“The human body count and human health toll of particulate matter
alone is just absolutely massive,” said K. Sabeel Rahman, a Cornell
law professor who was a top federal regulatory officer from 2021 to
2023. “Literally tens of thousands of people will lose their lives"
if the standard is rolled back, he said.
A penguin-shaped nebulizer
In southwest Indiana, many people have noticed a positive difference
from the EPA regulations. And they're concerned about changes.
In Bloomfield, Jessica Blazier's 11-year-old son Julian has multiple
health conditions that make him more sensitive to air quality,
including nonallergic rhinitis, which inflames his nasal passage and
makes breathing “feel like a knife sometimes," in his words. Jessica
Blazier said the proposed EPA rule rollbacks are “almost adding
insult to injury in our particular circumstance.”
In Evansville, Ethridge is now raising kids of his own, including a
5-year-old daughter who was born early and doesn’t tolerate
respiratory illnesses well. Whenever Eliza gets sick, she uses a
children’s nebulizer that is shaped like a penguin and stored in an
igloo-shaped case.
“I want to raise my kids in Evansville,” he said. “I don’t want to
raise my kids in a bowl of pollution.”
___
Borenstein and Daly reported from Washington, Walling and Bickel
from Evansville, Indiana, and Wildeman from Hartford, Connecticut.
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