Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has made significant changes to the way it conducts economic analyses of regulatory actions. Changes in the assumptions and methods used in regulatory impact analyses (RIAs) have produced fundamentally different conclusions about the economic benefits and costs of significant regulations. At the same time, the EPA has eliminated its Environmental Economics Advisory Committee (EEAC), which had provided external review of key inputs to the agency’s benefit–cost analyses, such as the value of a statistical life. This article describes the history and activities of the EEAC to increase understanding of the role it served and what has been lost by eliminating it. In addition, we discuss our own experience as recent EEAC members. We also present examples of the very different results produced by the Obama and Trump administrations’ economic analyses of the same EPA rules to illustrate why external review is so important for ensuring that economic analyses are credible, robust, and not influenced by political agendas.

中文翻译：

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政策简报-需要在美国EPA进行更多（不少于）外部分析的经济分析

在唐纳德·特朗普总统（Donald Trump）的领导下，美国环境保护署（EPA）对进行监管行为的经济分析的方式进行了重大改变。监管影响分析（RIA）中使用的假设和方法的变化，对重大法规的经济收益和成本产生了根本不同的结论。同时，EPA取消了其环境经济咨询委员会（EEAC），该委员会已对该机构的收益成本分析的关键输入（例如统计寿命的价值）进行了外部审查。本文介绍了EEAC的历史和活动，以加深对EEAC所扮演的角色的了解，以及消除它所造成的损失。此外，我们讨论了自己作为EEAC新成员的经验。