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TRUMP’S E.P.A. HAS PUT A VALUE ON HUMAN LIFE: ZERO DOLLARS  
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Maxine Joselow
January 21, 2026
The New York Times
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_ The Environmental Protection Agency has stopped estimating the
dollar value of lives saved in the cost-benefit analyses for new
pollution rules. _

Los Angeles smog in 1979. For decades, government agencies have used
a theoretical value of human life when calculating the costs and
benefits of new regulations.Credit..., Bettmann/Getty Images

 

Government officials have long grappled with a question
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that seems like the purview of philosophers: What is the value of a
human life?

Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the answer has
been in the millions of dollars. The higher the value, the more the
government has required businesses to spend on their operations to
prevent a single death.

But for the first time ever, at the Environmental Protection Agency
the answer is effectively zero dollars.

Last week, the E.P.A. stopped estimating the monetary value
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of lives saved when setting limits on two of the most widespread
deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone. Instead, the
agency is calculating only the costs to companies of complying with
pollution regulations.

“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero
value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at
Stanford University, said in an email. “If your kid breathes in air
pollution from a power plant or industrial source, E.P.A. is saying
that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost
the emitter.”

It’s a drastic change to the way the government weighs the costs of
curbing air pollution against the benefits to public health and the
environment. It could lead to looser controls on pollutants from
coal-burning power plants
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oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial sites across the
country, resulting in dirtier air.

And it appears to shelve a powerful tool, known as the value of a
statistical life, that agencies have used for decades in the
cost-benefit analyses that justify new regulations.

The E.P.A. has used the tool to assign a dollar value to the lives
saved by clean-air rules, causing the benefits of these rules to dwarf
the costs by at least a 30-to-1 ratio. That has allowed it to defend
pollution controls that companies would otherwise challenge as too
costly.

Other federal agencies have used the metric to justify regulations
affecting everything from safety features on cars to cancer warning
labels on cigarette packs.

Brigit Hirsch, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in an email that the agency
was still considering the health effects of fine particulate matter
and ozone, but was no longer assigning them a dollar value in
cost-benefit analyses. “We’re not putting a dollar value on those
impacts right now,” she said. “That does not mean E.P.A. is
ignoring or undervaluing them.”

Ms. Hirsch did not comment on whether the agency would stop using the
value of a statistical life for all regulations beyond clean-air
rules. But in general, she said, “saying we aren’t attaching a
dollar figure to health effects is like saying we aren’t putting a
price tag on clean air or safe drinking water. Dollars and cents
don’t define their worth.”

For the past 30 years, the E.P.A. has pegged the value of a
statistical life at around $11.7 million. Although experts have
recommended increasing the value, the agency has updated the metric
only to account for inflation and wage growth.

The value of a statistical life is a sensitive subject in Washington.
Lower values have led to outcry from public interest groups, while
higher values have drawn complaints from a range of industries,
including oil and gas drillers, truck drivers and toy manufacturers
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Some critics have raised moral objections to using the tool at all,
saying a human life is priceless. But supporters say its use has
helped prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from air
pollution, which kills more Americans each year
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than vehicle crashes.

 

[A small boy in a red jersey shoots a basketball on an outdoor court.]
A robust body of research has linked long-term exposure to fine
particulate matter and ozone to premature death as well as asthma,
dementia, and heart and lung disease.Credit...Mette Lampcov for The
New York Times

The biggest driver of those deaths is fine particulate matter, or
PM2.5, which refers to particles less than 2.5 micrometers in
diameter, small enough to enter the bloodstream. Another silent killer
is ozone, a smog-causing gas that forms when emissions from power
plants, factories and vehicles mix in the air on hot, sunny days.

A robust body of research has linked long-term exposure to both
pollutants to premature death as well as asthma, dementia, and heart
and lung disease. Even moderate exposure to PM2.5 can damage the lungs
about as much as smoking
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studies show.

But in a document posted online on Monday
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the E.P.A. claimed that the economic benefits of reducing PM2.5 and
ozone were too uncertain. The E.P.A. said that it would stop
tabulating these benefits “until the agency is confident enough in
the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.”

Some regulatory experts had mixed reactions to the move.

“On one hand, the administration does make some valid points that
E.P.A. statements have implied a false precision in the past,” said
Susan Dudley, who led the White House Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs during President George W. Bush’s second term and
now teaches at George Washington University. “On the other hand, the
way to rectify that is not to stop quantifying the health effects
altogether.”

Others were less circumspect in their criticism.

“If the rationale is that benefits are uncertain, well, costs are
uncertain, too,” said Alan Krupnick, a senior fellow at Resources
for the Future, a nonprofit research group. “Considering costs
without considering benefits is like trying to cut a piece of cloth
with one blade of the scissors: The cut is likely going to be
inaccurate and rough.”

Michael Greenstone, an environmental economist at the University of
Chicago, said the change could result in dirtier air, undercutting the
gains made since Congress strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1970.
Steep reductions in PM2.5 pollution have added 1.4 years to the
average American’s life expectancy since 1970, according to research
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by the University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index project.

“Clean air is one of the great success stories of government policy
in the last half-century,” Dr. Greenstone said. “And at the heart
of the Clean Air Act is the idea that when you allow people to lead
longer and healthier lives, that has value that can be measured in
dollars.”

Dr. Greenstone and other economists said the value of a statistical
life has often been misinterpreted as the value that the government
assigns to a single person’s life. But it is actually the value that
the government assigns to slightly reducing the risk of death for a
large group of people.

To determine this value, government economists have turned to studies
on the labor market, which show that workers demand higher wages
before agreeing to perform jobs with greater risks of workplace
fatalities.

Say that employers must pay lumberjacks an additional $1,000 a year to
perform work that generally kills one in 1,000 workers. It follows
that most Americans would forgo $1,000 a year to avoid that risk and
that 1,000 Americans would collectively forgo $1 million to avoid the
same risk entirely. Therefore, in this example, the value of a
statistical life would be $1 million.

[White smoke pours from a collection of industrial structures near a
single story home.]
Steep reductions in PM2.5 pollution have added 1.4 years to the
average American’s life expectancy since 1970, one study
found.Credit...Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

Tweaking the tool raises thorny ethical and philosophical questions,
said W. Kip Viscusi, an economist at Vanderbilt University whose
research on the value of a statistical life has been cited by many
agencies.

“Should the government place the same dollar value on everybody’s
life?” Dr. Viscusi asked. “Should rich people’s lives be valued
more? Should old people’s lives be valued less?”

The American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for major oil and gas
companies, has urged the E.P.A. to consider using a lower value for
older people. In a 2018 public comment
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group wrote that most of the lives saved by stronger ozone standards
would be “among the elderly population — not individuals in their
highest earning years.”

Scott Lauermann, a spokesman for the institute, said in an email that
the group was still reviewing the E.P.A.’s new approach but that it
appreciated the agency’s focus on “sound science.”

In 2003, during George W. Bush’s first term, the White House
proposed that the E.P.A. use a 37 percent lower value of a statistical
life for people older than 70. But the backlash was intense: Older
Americans and environmentalists protested what they called a “senior
death discount
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at E.P.A. hearings. The AARP, a nonprofit group that advocates on
behalf of older Americans, ran ads featuring an older woman with a
“37 percent off!” tag hanging from her glasses.

The Bush administration ultimately abandoned the idea, and the
“environmental critics won the P.R. battle,” said John D. Graham,
who led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
at the time and now teaches at Indiana University Bloomington.

“My students tell me I should have started by pushing a premium on
the value of saving the lives of children, since they have so many
high-quality years of life ahead of them,” Dr. Graham said in an
email. “In hindsight, that might have been a better approach.”

Dr. Viscusi said that if other agencies followed the E.P.A.’s latest
approach, they would leave Americans more vulnerable to a range of
threats to their lives and livelihoods.

“Whether it’s highway safety, job safety or consumer product
safety, the biggest benefits of regulations are from saving lives,”
he said. “If saving lives is made irrelevant, it will undermine the
justification for all forms of protective policies.”

_MAXINE JOSELOW_ [[link removed]]_ covers
climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington._

 

* EPA Regulations
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* humans
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* no value
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