What Trump's EPA Didn't Tell You About the $1.3 Trillion Claim
What Trump's EPA Didn't Tell You About the $1.3 Trillion Claim
What Trump's EPA Didn't Tell You About the $1.3 Trillion Claim
On February 12, 2026, Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stood in the Roosevelt Room and repealed the endangerment finding. The finding was a 2009 determination that greenhouse gases from cars, trucks, and power plants endanger public health. It was the legal foundation for nearly every federal climate regulation written since. Without it, the EPA has no authority under the Clean Air Act to limit the emissions that come out of a tailpipe.
Zeldin called it the single largest act of deregulation in American history. Trump said it would save Americans $1.3 trillion and bring car prices down by $2,400 a vehicle. The White House press secretary said the same thing two days before at her briefing. The number was repeated on the steps, at the podium, and in the press release. It is in EPA fact sheet 420-F-26-002, published that morning. The same document describes the previous administration's push toward electric vehicles as "illegal."
What was not read out at the podium was in a second document published the same day by the same agency. The full Regulatory Impact Analysis, EPA-420-R-26-002, runs the numbers in full. It shows savings of $1.29 trillion, which is the figure Trump cited. It also shows costs of $1.47 trillion, which is the figure he did not. Those costs come from higher fuel and maintenance bills that Americans will pay over the life of their vehicles once fuel efficiency standards are gone. The net result, in the EPA's own main scenario at a standard three percent discount rate, is a loss of $180 billion to society. Not a saving. A loss.
The document is careful to say that certain costs were not counted at all. Health costs were described as difficult to quantify and were left out of the analysis. Those health costs are real and named. Greenhouse gases accelerate the formation of ground-level ozone and make wildfires more frequent and more intense, and both raise the amount of harmful pollution that people breathe. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that the full cost of increased emissions — health damage, climate harm, and pollution — will reach $4.7 trillion by 2055. That figure was not in the EPA's table. The EPA did not dispute that these costs exist. It said they were too hard to measure and moved on.
The science behind the original 2009 finding was not disputed in the repeal. The EPA did not say the climate research was wrong. It said the agency no longer had the legal authority to act on it. That is a different argument, and it is the one that will be tested in court. The National Academies of Sciences reviewed the underlying research in September 2025 at the EPA's own request and found that the evidence linking greenhouse gases to public harm had grown stronger, not weaker, since 2009. That report is in the EPA's own docket. The agency noted it and then set it aside.
Environmental groups filed suits within hours of the announcement. California's governor said the state would sue. Twenty-three state attorneys general had already written to the EPA in September urging it not to proceed. Legal experts say the case will move through the federal courts and likely reach the Supreme Court before Trump's term ends. The administration has said it wants that outcome. It is moving fast for that reason.
What is already settled is what the EPA's own analysis shows. The press release carried the savings. The full report carried the loss. Both came out of the same building on the same day. The $1.3 trillion was announced in the Roosevelt Room to cameras and reporters. The $180 billion net loss was in a table in an appendix.
The finding took seventeen years and three administrations to build. It took one morning to repeal. The full cost, by the EPA's own accounting, was on page twenty-three.