Trump administration’s own analyses show regulation risks
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s push to roll back federal regulations will take a significant toll on Americans’ health and finances, according to a surprising source: the Trump administration itself.
These human costs — which include more deaths from air pollution, higher medical bills and increased student debt — rarely get mentioned by the president, who often touts the economic benefits of his deregulatory campaign.
But a review of thousands of pages of federal regulatory and legal filings shows that multiple agencies predict in their own analyses that the changes will cause an extensive list of harmful, even deadly, effects.
The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, calculated as many as 1,400 more premature deaths a year as a result of its proposed rule providing incentives to electric utilities to keep coal-fired power plants operating longer.
The Department of Education, which has taken several steps to scale back rules on for-profit colleges and universities, conceded that one of its rollbacks had left students with more than $50 million in additional debt.
The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged in regulatory filings that its proposal to curtail immigrants’ access to Medicaid and other government safety net programs risks increasing malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
And the Department of Health and Human Services predicted that a regulation lifting restrictions on health plans with skimpier benefits would reduce sicker patients’ access to medical care and expose them higher costs.
“I have never seen an administration take such a callous view of the health impacts of their policy proposals,” said Lyndsay Moseley Alexander, who directs the American Lung Association’s Healthy Air Campaign.
Federal agencies often say in regulatory filings that those costs are outweighed by economic benefits. Officials project that their moves will spur economic growth, cut government spending or reduce administrative burdens.
Trump routinely cheers such benefits. “We’ve cut regulations more than any president ever,” the president told Fox Business News at a recent White House event in which he claimed deregulation was saving billions of dollars.
But hundreds of patient groups, public health organizations, consumer advocates and others dispute that, saying that many of the administration’s proposals pose particular risks for vulnerable Americans.
“The notion that deregulation is good for the economy and good for consumers is ill-conceived,” said Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League. “In fact, the overall cost of deregulation is actually a drag on the economy because it ultimately hurts consumers and harms their health.”
Since the Reagan administration, federal rules have required agencies to lay out the anticipated costs and benefits of proposed regulations through regulatory impact analyses.
Under Trump, several major policy initiatives have been undertaken without a full accounting of their potential effects.
The Department of Education, for example, did not report how many student borrowers would be affected by a proposed rule issued earlier this year making it more difficult for students who have been defrauded by colleges or universities to get debt relief.
Only when borrowers sued did the agency acknowledge in court filings that scaling back the federal government’s debt relief program had left students with $56.9 million in additional debt.
Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services has been granting states permission to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries without any assessment of how many people could lose health coverage as a result.