How AP calculated the costs and death toll of EPA rule rollbacks

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump is aiming to undo or revise more than 30 major environmental regulations, many of them written or updated by the Biden administration. These include rules for cleaner vehicles, power plant emissions, and limits on tiny airborne particles known to harm human health.

The Associated Press set out to examine what might happen if all the rules were eliminated. The AP built on earlier work by the Environmental Protection Network, reviewing thousands of pages of regulatory impact analyses — documents agencies must produce for major rules with economic effects.

The methods used to estimate the annual financial costs and benefits of each rule have been largely standard since Ronald Reagan's presidency. Each analysis must go through