The Environmental Protection Agency has dropped the practice of valuing human lives in setting limits on deadly air pollutants, now counting only the costs to companies.
The EPA, led by President Donald Trump’s ally, Lee Zeldin, made the decision last week in a drastic policy shake-up.
Normally, the EPA calculates the benefits of air pollution rules by estimating how many lives will be saved and then assigning each of those lives a monetary value—a method called the “value of a statistical life.”
For decades, the agency has used roughly $11.7 million per life to show that the health benefits of cleaner air far outweigh the costs to businesses.
The metric has been applied across federal agencies to defend everything from car safety features to cigarette warning labels.
Last week, however, the EPA dropped this practice for two of the deadliest pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, choosing instead to focus only on the financial cost to companies of meeting pollution standards.
This shift could weaken regulations on industrial emissions from power plants, refineries, and factories, potentially leading to dirtier air nationwide.
The change comes despite strong evidence linking PM2.5 and ozone—tiny particles and smog-forming gases from industrial emissions—to premature death, heart and lung disease, dementia, and asthma.
The EPA now says the economic benefits of reducing these pollutants are “too uncertain” to quantify until modeling improves, effectively shelving the tool that has long allowed regulators to weigh human health alongside corporate costs.
In a document posted online on Monday, the EPA said that it would stop tabulating these benefits “until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”
Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, told The New York Times that this effectively puts the value of human life at zero.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Burke said. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, EPA is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the EPA for comment.
Fine particulate matter—tiny particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers—can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, with moderate exposure causing damage comparable to smoking. Ground-level ozone, a smog-forming gas from cars, power plants, and factories, can trigger asthma and heart and lung disease, even though ozone high in the atmosphere shields the planet from harmful UV rays.
Under the Biden administration, the EPA tightened limits on fine particulate emissions from industrial sources.
A 2024 agency study projected that the rule could prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays by 2032.
But the Trump administration has dismissed these figures as “doubtful,” according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
While debates over how many lives are saved by environmental regulations are common, no previous administration in the past 40 years has abandoned the practice entirely.
Zeldin has previously denied that the change means the EPA will no longer factor in lives saved when setting pollution limits.
“Cute BS headline. Entirely untrue, but the NY Times won’t ever let the truth get in the way of their desire to dumb down their readers,” he said in a post on X in reference to a previous Times story on the issue. “The Times posted this ENTIRELY AWARE that EPA will continue considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.”
