Bad Faith Disregard of Benefits and Science in Federal Environmental Deregulation
Michael Gerrard | New York Law Journal | April 22, 2026
Since the beginning of the Reagan administration in 1981, federal agencies have used cost-benefit analysis when making important policy decisions, especially when issuing regulations. In the years since then, the methodologies have been refined and enshrined in White House guidance.
The second Trump administration has upended these practices by often ignoring the benefits of regulations and only considering the costs. In doing so it often claims that there are such uncertainties about the benefits that they should be disregarded. It uses these claims in support of repealing or softening regulations that prior administrations found would save thousands of human lives.
If scientific uncertainty was the real reason for disregarding benefits, a good faith response would be to conduct more research to reduce the uncertainty. Instead, the Trump administration has systematically cancelled research programs, closed laboratories, fired scientists, distorted research results, and generally attacked the scientific enterprise. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this disregard of benefits is a bad faith effort to reduce regulations that are costly to the industries the administration favors.
This disregard of benefits is occurring throughout the federal and some state governments. The Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is famously doing so with regard to vaccines. This article is focused on environmental regulations and on the administration’s assault on environmental science, especially climate science.