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IU McKinney Professor of Practice Janet McCabe was quoted in a New York Times story challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to undo the public health benefits of environmental regulation.

The newspaper reported in the story, “New E.P.A. Plan Could Free Coal Plants to Release More Mercury Into the Air” on December 28 that the Trump administration has proposed major changes to the way the federal government calculates the benefits, in human health and safety, of restricting mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants.

In the proposal, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a finding declaring that federal rules imposed on mercury by the Obama administration are too costly to justify and drastically changed the formula the government uses in its required cost-benefit analysis of the regulation by taking into account only certain effects that can be measured in dollars, while ignoring or playing down other health benefits.

“There is a likelihood that this rule-making will be the administration’s flagship effort to permanently change the way the federal government considers health benefits,” Professor McCabe said.

Professor McCabe is Assistant Director for Policy and Implementation at IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute. She is also a Senior Law Fellow with the Environmental Law and Policy Center. She previously served at the EPA as the Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation from 2013 to 2017, and was nominated by President Barack Obama to be Assistant Administrator of that office. She joined EPA in November 2009, serving as the Principal Deputy to the Assistant Administrator of OAR.