EPA to Stop Counting Health Benefits in Air Pollution Rules, Raising Concerns About Public Health
January 19, 2026
The Environmental Protection Agency has announced a major change in how it evaluates air pollution regulations, saying it will no longer assign a monetary value to the health benefits of reducing harmful pollution such as fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone. Instead, the agency will focus only on the economic costs to industry when setting pollution limits, a departure from decades of practice that balanced industry costs against public health gains. Critics say this shift could weaken air quality protections and may lead to higher levels of pollution with increased health risks for vulnerable populations.
Traditionally, the EPA’s cost-benefit analyses included estimates of how many lives would be saved and how many illnesses, hospital visits, and work-loss days would be avoided when emissions were cut. Those figures helped justify stronger regulations and highlighted the economic value of cleaner air. Under the new approach, the agency contends that existing methods for calculating these health benefits are too uncertain, so it will omit them from its economic models for now. Public health and environmental advocates argue this change undermines the core mission of protecting human health and could make it easier to roll back protections on power plants, industrial facilities, and vehicles that emit dangerous pollutants.
