EPA said it determined the country would save hundreds of billions of dollars a year by revoking the endangerment finding and scrapping rules to limit climate pollution from vehicles.
But to reach that conclusion, the agency skipped basic practices it routinely uses when projecting the effects of new regulations. It did not do any new modeling that would have informed its projections about how repealing the rules would impact the economy, pollution levels, public health and employment, according to environmental advocates and former EPA officials.
Instead, the agency made the case in its written analysis that the nation would be enriched by the administration’s moves to cancel the regulations — the opposite finding of the Biden EPA, which estimated that the rules would lower climate pollution, reduce illness and prevent premature deaths among Americans.
The Trump administration’s conclusions can be hard to square.
In one section of the so-called regulatory impact analysis, EPA concedes that the rollback and other Trump policies would lead to slightly higher gasoline prices. But then it concludes that the cost of gas would actually be $1 lower compared to Biden-era projections. The agency, which didn’t provide data showing how it arrived at that number, argued that President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” policies would reduce costs.
“It’s a lot of funny math,” said Kathy Harris, director of the clean vehicles program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It is sometimes migraine-inducing trying to understand some of the circular logic they’re using behind some of these justifications.”
Congress required agencies to weigh the costs and benefits of major new regulations. EPA’s regulatory impact analysis, or RIA, fulfills that obligation by showing the impacts of its July proposal to jettison the endangerment finding for greenhouse gas emissions and climate standards for cars and trucks.
The two repeals are possibly the most consequential climate policy EPA has undertaken. The scientific finding has made Clean Air Act climate rules legally possible for 16 years. The Biden-era tailpipe rules curb carbon from the highest-emitting sector of the U.S. economy: motor vehicles.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the package the “largest deregulatory action” in the agency’s history when he rolled it out this summer at a truck dealership in Indiana.
EPA claims the dual proposal would save the U.S. economy up to $444 billion annually through 2055, overwhelming the $5 billion to $8 billion in losses it projects would occur from rolling back the rules, like increased car congestion and additional particulate pollution.
These analyses typically span hundreds of pages and contain new modeling to show how a proposed action would change the U.S. economy, pollution levels, public health and other factors.
But the analysis for EPA’s draft repeal of the endangerment finding and the climate rules for vehicles is just 63 pages. Altogether, the RIA is about 3.5 percent as long as the Biden EPA’s two regulatory analyses for the tailpipe emissions rules for passenger vehicles and long-haul trucks.
Trump’s EPA borrows from the Biden-era modeling outputs and then tweaks them to reflect new assumptions about its own proposal.
“They basically just flip the columns so that costs are now benefits, and benefits are now costs,” said James Goodwin, policy director for the Center for Progressive Reform.
“What this analysis is focused on is taking apart the original numbers for the 2024 cost-benefit analysis to try to make that [Biden-era] rule look like it had negative net costs, so that its rescission would then have net benefits,” he added.
The document owes its staggeringly low page count to conspicuous omissions. It doesn’t include analyses for a wide range of factors that past administrations have modeled and analyzed as a matter of course.
It’s unclear whether that will change before the proposal becomes final — which EPA says it aims to do by the end of this year. The agency is taking public comment now.
When finalized, the repeal of the car rules and endangerment finding are likely to be litigated, and some attorneys say a slim regulatory analysis could be a liability for the Trump administration.
“I think it’s a huge risk,” said Jason Schwartz, legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity. “A document like this makes it so clear that they have not done the work in thinking through the actual effects of their deregulation, and that is legally required.”
EPA press secretary Carolyn Holran responded to queries from POLITICO’S E&E News by pointing to language in the draft rule asserting that “EPA has not relied upon any aspect of the draft RIA as justification for this proposed rulemaking.”
Not much climate change
The analysis covers proposals to repeal both the endangerment finding and standards for carbon emissions from light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. But it doesn’t say anything about the potential impact of removing the endangerment finding, which has been used to justify numerous climate regulations, including carbon standards for power generation and oil and gas development.
That’s not unprecedented. The Obama EPA didn’t analyze the costs and benefits of the rules that could follow from the original finding, arguing that the Clean Air Act directed the agency to make the determination on the basis of science alone. Regulatory costs and benefits would be weighed later as rules were proposed.
Holran, the EPA spokesperson, pointed to the Obama-era precedent to explain why the agency didn’t analyze costs and benefits when proposing to repeal the endangerment finding. But one of the Trump administration’s chief criticisms of the finding has been that the Obama-era EPA failed to do just that.
“The EPA has never meaningfully considered or invited public comment on the cost, effectiveness, and continued propriety of its [greenhouse gas] regulatory program,” EPA argued in its July repeal proposal. “We propose that these considerations should have been taken into account when the 2009 endangerment finding intentionally triggered a ‘duty to regulate’ vehicle emissions.”
Repealing the finding would take EPA out of the game of regulating climate pollution permanently, except in a handful of instances where Congress has given EPA explicit directions to do so, such as phasing out climate-forcing refrigerants.
If the Obama EPA should have considered the societal impacts of regulations that stemmed from the 2009 endangerment finding, some experts say, the Trump administration should have done the same for their removal.
“It’s notable that they didn’t really follow their own advice here,” said Schwartz of the Institute for Policy Integrity.
The document also ignores the climate impacts of scrapping greenhouse gas rules for cars and trucks. That’s a departure from the first Trump administration, during which EPA applied a greatly-reduced “social cost of carbon” as a metric for climate damages.
It’s also different from what EPA did in its June draft repealing the greenhouse gas standards on power plants. In that proposal, EPA grappled with the climate impact of scrapping the standards, if only to conclude the effect would be limited.
Its new analysis for the endangerment finding mentions “climate” only six times. In two of those instances, it appears as part of the name of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, whose research EPA cites.
“They’re repealing rules relating to greenhouse gases, and there is barely a mention of climate at all,” said Schwartz.
EPA didn’t monetize the societal benefits of avoiding climate change. But it asserts that “any reliable estimate of that value would be orders of magnitude less than the benefits of the proposed action.”
The Trump administration’s analysis effectively values the harm of climate change at zero. The Biden EPA estimated that its rules for light- and medium-duty vehicles, finalized last year, would have delivered $150 billion in annual benefits from avoided warming through 2055.
Omitted impacts on pollution and health
EPA’s analysis also sharply reduces estimates for the health impacts of lowering particulate matter — a toxic form of pollution that’s linked to respiratory and pulmonary disease and death.
The Biden-era rule for light- and medium-duty vehicles showed $10 billion in annualized health benefits from reductions in particulate pollution averaged over the life of the rule. The repeal’s analysis lowers that to between $2 billion and $4 billion annually, arguing that the Biden administration underestimated “emissions offsets” associated with electric vehicles. That includes increased fossil-fuel-based power that it said would be needed to power an electric vehicle fleet.
EPA also noted that its proposal would leave standards in place for non-climate pollutants — called “criteria pollutants” — that cause smog and soot.
Undoing the vehicle rules for carbon could result in “incidental” increases in fossil fuels costs of between $1.4 billion and $2.3 billion annually through 2055 compared with the Biden-era baseline, EPA said.
No modeling
Another departure from past practice is how EPA arrived at the conclusions in its analysis.
“They basically took previous modeling results and then just did some calculations — some rough approximations — without doing any modeling,” said Joshua Linn, an economist at the University of Maryland.
One example is EPA’s conclusions about fuel costs. It assumes that in a scenario where the vehicle rules are repealed diesel and gasoline will cost more in the future than the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected in 2024. It’s the result of Congress curtailing EV tax credits and the loss of California’s clean vehicle standards, not just the repeal of the EPA rules.
But then the agency concludes that gasoline will cost $1 less per gallon than EIA projected in its 2023 outlook — an assertion EPA doesn’t fully explain or provide a citation for.
The lack of new model runs — which typically take months — could mean that EPA isn’t providing reliable projections for technology adoption and other outcomes that would flow from the rule, Linn said.
EPA didn’t respond to questions about why it opted not to do new modeling ahead of releasing the draft. Linn said it might have something to do with EPA’s expedited release of the draft just six months into Trump’s second term.
In other sections, EPA relies on research from academia to support some of its assumptions. For example, it cites an analysis by Linn and other researchers to explain why it chose to count only 2.5 years in cost savings from reduced fuel consumption under the Biden rules. That substantially lowered the financial benefits of the Biden-era standards — and thus the cost of the Trump proposal to repeal them.
But Linn said his research supported EPA counting fuel savings for seven years instead.
“Roughly speaking, using the longer payback period would increase the costs of revoking the standards — that is, forgone fuel cost savings — by a factor of three,” he said.
Elaine Buckberg, who helped write a Salata Institute report that showed how the loss of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits would impact EV adoption and affordability, said EPA’s characterization of that analysis “is, in fact, accurate.”
“Take away policy support for EVs and EV adoption still advances, but not as fast as it would have had the policies remained in place,” she said in an email.
Jean Chemnick can be reached on Signal at jchemnick.01
