The Environmental Protection Agency, true to its name, is meant to protect the environment from the horrifying levels of pollution and industrial waste that ran rampant at the agency’s founding in 1970. It’s also meant to protect us, whether you define “us” as Americans, human beings or simply inhabitants of the planet. Under the leadership of director Lee Zeldin, the EPA is now more concerned about the health and well-being of America’s corporations than it is either of its previous charges.
The EPA has already followed the lead of the rest of the Trump administration in shuttering offices dealing with environmental justice and rolling back regulations meant to slow the pace of climate change. According to The New York Times, the agency now “plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry.”
The industries that stand most to benefit are ones that have already dealt out massive health costs over the decades.
Different administrations have always placed different dollar amounts on various hazards to Americans’ health when weighing the costs and benefits of regulations. For example, in 2011 the EPA determined the “Value of a Statistical Life” to be $9.1 million in an analysis on the impacts a rule to lower air pollution would have. According to the Times’ reporting, “until now, no administration has counted it as zero.”
As climate journalist Emily Atkin rightly said on Bluesky, it’s very easy to determine that regulations “do way more harm than good if you don’t count all the lives they save.”
The industries that stand most to benefit are ones that have already dealt out massive health costs over the decades. “The change could make it easier to repeal limits on these pollutants from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country, the emails and documents show,” the Times reported. “That would most likely lower costs for companies while resulting in dirtier air.”
While the broader changes that the Times reported are still forthcoming, similar language has already been included in at least one final rule from the EPA. John Walke, a former EPA lawyer currently with the Natural Resources Defense Council, flagged a section buried within a recently released rule to allow data centers to emit more pollution. More worrisome, it also claims that previous EPA estimates of the cost in human lives from pollution were unreliable and misled the public about how well the agency can make those determinations. I doubt that there’s a lot of human effort being devoted to making those measurements more accurate As such, according to the rule, “the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone but will continue to quantify the emissions” until it is “confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.” In other words, the administration is framing the shift as simply a pause until a better way of measuring the actual impact of those pollutants can be found. I doubt that there’s a lot of human effort being devoted to making those measurements more accurate to better prevent the asthma, heart disease and lung disease that the particles in question are known to cause. My colleague Steve Benen has already noted the backlash Zeldin’s pro-corporate stance has prompted within the Trump base’s “Make America Healthy Again” wing. It seems doubtful, though, that the EPA will suddenly shift gears again to prioritize human lives over profit margins. After all, then-GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was lambasted in 2012 for declaring that “corporations are people, my friend.” But it seems that the EPA has gone a step further, determining that America’s corporations are more important than people, at least when it comes to whose health must be safeguarded.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily. 
