Over a single week in January, the federal government quietly rewrote how the United States values clean air and water. A cluster of decisions from President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency and the Supreme Court stripped away core tools that have underpinned public health protections for roughly a century, from the early days of the Clean Air Act to modern climate rules. The result is a regulatory system that now treats premature deaths and chronic illness as side notes, not central costs to be avoided.
I see a through line in these moves: a deliberate effort to narrow what counts as harm, while expanding what counts as a burden on industry. The shift is technical on paper, but the stakes are measured in hospital visits, asthma attacks and lives cut short, especially in communities that already breathe the dirtiest air and drink the most contaminated water.
How a bookkeeping change erased lives from the ledger
The most dramatic change arrived in the form of a new rule that tells The EPA to stop assigning a dollar value to lives saved and illnesses avoided when it writes air pollution standards. For decades, regulators used those monetized health benefits to show that cutting soot and ozone more than paid for itself, even after accounting for compliance costs. Now, as Jan agency officials have confirmed, the rule instructs analysts to ignore the economic cost of harm from fine particles and ozone, the very pollutants that drive heart attacks, strokes and respiratory disease for millions of Americans.
In practical terms, that means future cost benefit analyses will treat hospitalizations and premature deaths as if they are worth zero, while tallying every dollar spent on scrubbers and filters. Reporting on the change notes that The EPA will no longer apply a dollar amount to health benefits from clean air in its regulatory impact analysis, a shift that, as Jacobo has explained, fundamentally alters how new standards are justified. Public health experts warn that this accounting maneuver could make it easier to weaken limits on coal burning power plants, oil refineries and steel mills, even when the science shows that tighter rules would prevent thousands of deaths, because the official math will no longer credit those avoided tragedies.
Now that this framework is in place, The EPA has also signaled that it will no longer consider the economic cost of harm to human health from fine particles and ozone at all, a break with decades of practice that had treated those impacts as central to clean air policy. Analysts who have reviewed the rule say the change increases risks for millions of Americans who live near highways, industrial corridors and power plants, because it tilts every future decision toward cheaper, dirtier options.
A weak power plant rule and a broader deregulatory agenda
At the same time that the agency was rewriting its economic playbook, it finalized a separate regulation for New Gas plants that burn fossil fuels to generate electricity. The Trump EPA Finalizes Weak Rule to Reduce Dangerous Air Pollution from these Burning Power Plants, setting limits on nitrogen oxides that independent analysts say are far less stringent than what modern technology can achieve. The rule, which critics describe as ignoring health benefits and liv, was crafted using the new cost framework that sidelines the value of avoided deaths and disease.
This plant specific decision fits inside a much larger pattern. Key Insights from policy trackers show that Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has prioritized environmental Deregulation since returning to power, with a Fossil Fuel Friendly Approach that treats climate and pollution rules as obstacles to be dismantled. Internal planning documents cited by experts describe a top agenda that includes rolling back the climate endangerment finding, weakening vehicle emission standards and easing requirements on refineries and petrochemical facilities, all under the banner of cutting red tape for industry.
Businesses themselves are not uniformly cheering. Some large utilities and manufacturers have told poll based researchers that the constant rule whiplash creates uncertainty for big, long term investments in cleaner technology. As one analysis of the climate endangerment fight put it, Businesses face “chaos” as the EPA aims to repeal its authority over climate pollution, because companies that have already spent billions on cleaner equipment now have to guess whether those investments will still count in a future regulatory landscape.
Courts narrow the Clean Water Act while EPA retreats
Even as air rules are being hollowed out, the legal foundation for clean water protections is also being narrowed. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued a decision holding that the Clean Water Act, or CWA, does not authorize the Environmental agency to impose certain water quality standards on states through permits that cover wastewater and stormwater. The ruling sharply limits how federal officials can push states to clean up polluted rivers and estuaries that receive discharges from upstream industrial and municipal sources.
A companion analysis of the same case, Environmental Protection Agency, 145 S. Ct. 704 (2025), explains that while the Clean Water Act, or CWA, still allows the federal government to include water quality based conditions in permits, it cannot require states to take or refrain from taking specific actions to meet those standards. In practice, that means federal regulators can identify problems but have fewer tools to force concrete fixes, especially in regions where local officials are reluctant to crack down on powerful polluters. The decision arrives just as climate driven floods and storms are overwhelming aging sewer systems, sending more untreated waste into waterways that millions rely on for drinking water and recreation.
Regulatory rollbacks that add up to 200,000 lives
These headline changes sit atop a dense thicket of quieter moves that collectively unwind years of public health protections. On January, agency lawyers amended the Code of Federal Regulations to strip out amendments from a 2024 rule titled Review of Final, effectively erasing a set of procedural safeguards that had made it harder to weaken existing chemical safety standards. That change was effective On January 2, 2026, and it cleared the way for faster reversals of rules that had taken years of scientific review to build.
Earlier, the agency proposed to relieve coal fired power plants of a more stringent filterable particulate matter standard that had been adopted under the previous administration. The Jun proposal would lift those tighter limits and, by the agency’s own estimate, save operators about $120 million a year in compliance costs. Public health advocates counter that the savings come at the expense of more soot in the air, which is linked to heart and lung disease, especially in communities downwind of large plants that already rank among the nation’s pollution hot spots.
Independent analysts have tried to tally the human cost of this deregulatory wave. The Environmental Protection Network, or EPN, examined a subset of major rollbacks and concluded that just 12 of 31 actions would together lead to more than 200,000 additional deaths over time, a figure that reflects increased exposure to air toxics, soot and other pollutants. In a separate assessment, the same Environmental Protection Network warned that what one official hailed as “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” would in fact weaken core protections in the Clean Air Act and other landmark environmental laws that have been credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives since the 1970s.
Other experts have framed the trend as turning the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, upside down. A detailed review of recent decisions found that the Environmental Protection Agency continues to charge ahead with efforts to undo the country’s climate progress and that these rollbacks will cost the public both in dollars and in lives, as higher medical bills, lost work days and climate damages pile up. The same analysis notes that the agency’s choices are shifting costs from polluters to families, who will pay through higher insurance premiums, property losses from extreme weather and chronic health conditions that strain household budgets.
More from Morning Overview