The EPA Uses Funny Math to Justify Its Repeal of Clean Car Standards

While the administration repeated over and over again that the rule would save Americans $1.3 trillion, that’s literally only half of the story. As column two of the chart below shows, repealing the vehicle standards will result in $1,090 billion in lower vehicle technology costs and $200 billion less in infrastructure costs. So, it may be cheaper to buy a new vehicle (if automakers pass on these savings to customers), but if you actually want to drive that car, the extra costs accrue quickly. The EPA’s own numbers show that there will be a total of $1,470 billion in additional costs for fuel, maintenance, insurance, noise, etc. As a result, eliminating the clean car standards would cost the public at net of $180 billion, and that does not include the health and climate impacts, which the EPA didn’t even calculate at all.  

The EPA is now saying that this main analysis (table A-1) is just one of four, and the others show repeal to be a net positive. It’s true that the other scenarios show lower fueling benefits from the 2024 clean car standards, but that’s because the EPA put its thumb on the scale. In one scenario, it arbitrarily cut off consideration of fueling costs after just 2.5 years, so if you own your vehicle for 7, 10, or 20 years, all those additional years of gassing up at the pump don’t count. That makes no sense.  
 
In another, the analysis just arbitrarily cut the anticipated gasoline price. The EPA repeated its evaluation with a “low oil price” sensitivity scenario from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), artificially dropping gasoline prices by up to 73 cents a gallon and diesel by up to $1.19 a gallon to cut the fuel costs from repealing these standards. The EPA justifies this by saying that the EIA did not model “policies being implemented by President Trump that are intended to drive down the price of gasoline and diesel,” but this is inaccurate. The EIA did, in fact, assess the impact from Trump’s policies and found, as the EPA itself admits, that the proposed rollback—and Trump’s broader policies—would increase, not decrease, fuel prices.  

The EPA admits that repealing the standards—along with the already repealed electric vehicle (EV) incentives and California’s Advanced Clean Trucks regulation—would increase gasoline prices by as much as 9 percent over the next decade, adding more than $3 billion per year in fuel costs for U.S. drivers by 2035. The EPA explicitly states that eliminating these standards would increase gasoline by 75 cents a gallon by 2050 (a 29 percent increase over forecasted prices with the standards in place).

The EPA previously found that federal clean energy and EV tax credits would drive retail electricity prices down. In this regulatory analysis, the EPA concedes that the GOP’s 2025 tax law and new data center growth are driving up electricity prices for U.S. households and businesses while increasing profits for owners of coal and gas plants. The agency also notes that its prior finding of falling electricity prices is likely no longer accurate given these changes, but the EPA refused to update its modeling to quantify how electricity prices will rise and by how much. 

While the EPA refused to calculate the impacts of more pollution and climate damage, its supplemental report does show that there would be a significant increase in pollution. Repeal of both the cars and trucks rules would result in an additional 114,000 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx) in the air per year by 2055; NOx is key to the formation of smog. That’s more than 15 percent of all the NOx released by U.S. power plants in a year. It would also lead to a stunning additional 6.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 30 years, more than the entire U.S. economy now emits in a year.

The EPA’s own final regulatory analysis confirms that eliminating vehicle greenhouse gas standards would raise costs for American drivers and households. The agency’s attempts to justify the rollbacks depend on ignoring major benefits and relying on economic scenarios that do not match real-world conditions. 

In short: Eliminating clean car standards leaves Americans paying more at the pump, more in repairs, and more overall.