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clean air act
Senate Dems Launch Investigation Into Trump EPA Policy to 'Disregard' Health Impacts of Pollution
"The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President Trump’s largest donors,” the lawmakers wrote.
Feb 15, 2026
A group of 31 Democratic senators has launched an investigation into a new Trump administration policy that they say allows the Environmental Protection Agency to "disregard" the health impacts of air pollution when passing regulations.
Plans for the policy were first reported on last month by the New York Times, which revealed that the EPA was planning to stop tallying the financial value of health benefits caused by limiting fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone when regulating polluting industries and instead focus exclusively on the costs these regulations pose to industry.
On December 11, the Times reported that the policy change was being justified based on the claim that the exact benefits of curbing these emissions were “uncertain."
"Historically, the EPA’s analytical practices often provided the public with false precision and confidence regarding the monetized impacts of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone," said an email written by an EPA supervisor to his employees on December 11. “To rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone.”
The group of senators, led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), rebuked this idea in a letter sent Thursday to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
"EPA’s new policy is irrational. Even where health benefits are 'uncertain,' what is certain is that they are not zero," they said. "It will lead to perverse outcomes in which EPA will reject actions that would impose relatively minor costs on polluting industries while resulting in massive benefits to public health—including in saved lives."
"It is contrary to Congress’s intent and directive as spelled out in the Clean Air Act. It is legally flawed," they continued. "The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President [Donald] Trump’s largest donors."
Research published in 2023 in the journal Science found that between 1999 and 2020, PM2.5 pollution from coal-fired power plants killed roughly 460,000 people in the United States, making it more than twice as deadly as other kinds of fine particulate emissions.
While this is a staggering loss of life, the senators pointed out that the EPA has also been able to put a dollar value on the loss by noting quantifiable results of increased illness and death—heightened healthcare costs, missed school days, and lost labor productivity, among others.
Pointing to EPA estimates from 2024, they said that by disregarding human health effects, the agency risks costing Americans “between $22 and $46 billion in avoided morbidities and premature deaths in the year 2032."
Comparatively, they said, “the total compliance cost to industry, meanwhile, [would] be $590 million—between one and two one-hundredths of the estimated health benefit value."
They said the plan ran counter to the Clean Air Act's directive to “protect and enhance the quality of the Nation’s air resources so as to promote the public health and welfare,” and to statements made by Zeldin during his confirmation hearing, where he said "the end state of all the conversations that we might have, any regulations that might get passed, any laws that might get passed by Congress” is to “have the cleanest, healthiest air, [and] drinking water.”
The senators requested all documents related to the decision, including any information about cost-benefit modeling and communications with industry representatives.
"That EPA may no longer monetize health benefits when setting new clean air standards does not mean that those health benefits don’t exist," the senators said. "It just means that [EPA] will ignore them and reject safer standards, in favor of protecting corporate interests."
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In Gift to Big Oil Donors, Trump Stops EPA From Combating 'Most Terrible Environmental Threat in Human History'
Repealing the EPA's endangerment finding "isn’t about saving taxpayers’ money, it’s about saving an industry that has already been exposed as a permanent danger to American families," said the head of 350.org.
Feb 12, 2026
In what the Sierra Club described as an act to "formalize climate denialism as official government policy," the Trump administration announced Thursday that it has revoked the long-standing "endangerment finding" that allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to pass regulations fighting the climate crisis.
The 2009 endangerment finding determined that the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases posed a hazard to public health and welfare by causing the planet to warm dramatically, citing overwhelming scientific evidence, which has only grown more indisputable in the nearly two decades since.
With the US Supreme Court having ruled in 2007 that the EPA could make regulations on climate change if it were deemed a health risk, this finding served as the basis for virtually every climate-related EPA regulation under the 1970 Clean Air Act, including those limiting emissions from motor vehicles, power plants, oil and gas facilities, and other sources of pollution.
The finding has been a target of the fossil fuel industry since it was reached. Under President Donald Trump, who has boasted openly of serving the fossil fuel industry in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars of financial support during his last election, they have found their hero.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, who has enthusiastically backed Trump's initiatives to expand oil drilling and coal mining, called the repeal of the finding "the largest deregulatory action in the history of America."
Indeed, it is expected to immediately eviscerate fuel-efficiency standards and electric vehicle requirements for cars and trucks, which are already the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions in the US, contributing about 1.8 billion metric tons in 2022.
While the White House has said the reduced efficiency standards will “save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” this is a drop in the ocean compared to the $87 trillion in economic disruption that a study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania estimated will come over the next 25 years as a result of increased natural disasters and sea-level rise caused by American corporations' fossil fuel outputs.
In the United States, weather disasters—exacerbated by global warming—caused $115 billion in total damages last year, the third most since tracking began in 1980, behind only 2023 and 2024. Last year had more billion-dollar disasters than any other year on record.
Anne Jellema, the executive director of the environmental group 350.org, said repealing the endangerment finding "isn’t about saving taxpayers’ money, it’s about saving an industry that has already been exposed as a permanent danger to American families."
"While the Trump administration can manipulate scientific agencies, it can never suppress the truth that ordinary people in the US and around the world are paying the real price for Big Oil’s profits: Lives are being lost, homes are being destroyed, and costs are soaring," she said.
The Trump administration does not have the last word on the endangerment finding. Climate groups, including Earthjustice, have already stated their intention to challenge the legality of the decision.
"The courts have repeatedly affirmed EPA’s obligation to clean up climate pollution," said Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen. "There is no way to reconcile EPA’s decision with the law, the science, and the reality of disasters that are hitting us harder every year."
Dillen said, "Earthjustice and our partners will see the Trump administration in court.” But it may face an uphill battle.
Though the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for the finding's creation, the current right-wing majority has rolled back its authority in recent years, most notably in 2022, when the justices limited the EPA's authority to impose emissions standards on power plants.
David Arkush, the director of Public Citizen’s climate program, said that "if left to stand," the rollback of the endangerment finding "will hamstring the government’s ability to combat the most terrible environmental threat in human history, harming Americans and the world for decades to come."
“Abundant scientific evidence supports the EPA’s prior conclusion that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare," he added. "Americans feel the effects of climate change constantly, as we experience more dangerous hurricanes, furnace-like heat domes, walls of water slamming into our children’s summer camps, raging wildfires, and other extreme weather driven by greenhouse gases.”
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Corporate Polluters Running Rampant Under Trump as EPA Enforcement 'Dying a Quick Death'
“Administrator Zeldin is removing all incentives for big polluters to follow the law and turning a blind eye to those who suffer from the impacts of pollution.”
Jan 22, 2026
The Trump administration settled just 15 of the illegal pollution cases referred by the US Environmental Protection Agency in the first year of President Donald Trump's second term in the White House, according to data compiled by a government watchdog—the latest evidence that Trump officials are placing corporate profits above the EPA's mission to "protect human health and the environment."
In the report, The Collapse of Environmental Enforcement Under Trump's EPA, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) noted Thursday that in the first year of former President Joe Biden's administration, 71 cases referred by the EPA were prosecuted by the US Department of Justice (DOJ).
“Under [EPA Administrator] Lee Zeldin, anti-pollution enforcement is dying a quick death,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of PEER and a former enforcement attorney at EPA.
The DOJ lodged just one environmental consent decree in a case regarding a statutory violation of the Clean Air Act from the day Trump was inaugurated just over a year ago until now—signaling that the agency "virtually stopped enforcing" the landmark law that regulates air pollution.
"Enforcing the Clean Air Act means going after violators within the oil, gas, petrochemical, coal, and motor vehicle industries that account for most air pollution," reads the report. "But these White House favorites will be shielded from any serious enforcement, at least, while Lee Zeldin remains EPA’s administrator."
“For the sake of our health and the environment, Congress and the American people need to push back against Lee Zeldin’s dismantling of EPA’s environmental enforcement program.”
In the first year of his first term, Trump's DOJ settled 26 Clean Air Act cases, even more than the 22 the department prosecuted in Biden's first year.
The report warns that plummeting enforcement actions are likely to contribute to health harms in vulnerable communities located near waterways that are filled with "algae blooms, bacteria, or toxic chemicals" and near energy and chemical industry infrastructure, where people are more likely to suffer asthma attacks and heart disease caused by smog and soot.
“Enforcing environmental laws ensures that polluters are held accountable and prevented from dumping their pollution on others for profit,” said Joanna Citron Day, general counsel for PEER and a former senior counsel at DOJ’s Environmental Enforcement Section. “For the sake of our health and the environment, Congress and the American people need to push back against Lee Zeldin’s dismantling of EPA’s environmental enforcement program.”
EPA's own enforcement and compliance database identifies 2,374 major air pollution sources that have not had a full compliance evaluation in at least five years, and shows that no enforcement action has been taken at more than 400 sources that are marked as a "high priority."
Nearly 900 pollution sources reported to the EPA that they exceeded their wastewater discharge limits at least 50 times in the past two years.
The agency has also repealed its rules limiting carbon pollution from gas-powered cars, arguing that the EPA lacks the authority to regulate carbon.
As public health risks mount, PEER noted, Zeldin is moving forward with plans to stop calculating the health benefits of rules aimed at reducing air pollution, and issued a memo last month detailing a "compliance first" policy emphasizing a "cooperative, industry-friendly approach" to environmental regulation.
“Administrator Zeldin is removing all incentives for big polluters to follow the law," said Whitehouse, "and turning a blind eye to those who suffer from the impacts of pollution.”
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