In the News

The agency will curtail its reliance on animal testing, putting public health at risk.

“Particulate matter is extremely harmful and it leads to a large number of premature deaths,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University. He called the expected change a “monumental departure” from the approach both Republican and Democratic E.P.A. leaders have used over the past several decades and predicted that it would lay the groundwork for weakening more environmental regulations.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ new rule was accompanied by an assessment of its probable costs and benefits. Conspicuously absent from the tally: any acknowledgment of harms that the rule will impose on low-income women by reducing their access to affordable healthcare.

The administration’s so-called accomplishments, which include rolling back hazardous waste regulations and consumer protection rules, will inflict great harms on the American people, resulting in additional deaths, illnesses, and bankruptcies. The damages done by these heedless regulatory rollbacks significantly exceed the cost savings for regulated industries.

An industry-friendly replacement for Obama-era chemical facility safety rules is moving forward despite a court decision in August that questioned the agency’s basis for making changes. The agency could have a stronger case if it let the original rule take effect and proposed changes down the line based on real data developed during the implementation, Bethany Davis Noll said.

Those public health costs “could be the thing that determines whether the rule is actually justified or not,” Avi Zevin, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity, told Bloomberg Environment. “[EPA] should be doing a more complete consideration of what those costs of the foregone health benefits are, what they would mean, and how that factors into their decisionmaking,” Zevin said.

In a recent proposal to replace the Clean Power Plan, the Trump administration made little attempt to sugarcoat the consequences of its decision.

Some requirements for expanded training, safety information, compliance audits, investigations of close calls, emergency response coordination, and other provisions at chemical facilities would take effect immediately, Noll said—and companies should prepare. “For the companies that didn’t do that, I think they might be in trouble,” Noll said.

“In withdrawing the 2022-2025 greenhouse-gas standards, EPA arbitrarily ignored its own prior analysis as well as the facts,” said Bethany Davis Noll, director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. “The agency is acting without clear justification and creating a lot of legal question marks.”

The Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law has released a new report analyzing EPA’s decision to withdraw the standards that concludes the agency’s basis for withdrawing the standards is not grounded in fact or economic analysis. For example, EPA cites factors such as lower fuel prices and concerns about the growth of electric vehicles as reasons to reverse its earlier decision, but both fuel prices and electric vehicle sales are in fact rising.