Research Library

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has been under wide-scale attack this year. A series of congressional hearings and industry statements have argued that particular EPA regulations, especially in combination with one another, will damage the economy and lower employment. Previous Economic Policy Institute analyses discuss the relationship between regulations and employment in detail (Shapiro and Irons 2011). This paper examines the combined effects of the major EPA regulations that the Obama administration has already finalized as well as the regulations that it has proposed but not finalized. The paper focuses on major rules for which cost and benefit data are available. In May 2011, EPI first released a paper tallying up the effect of Obama EPA rules, but several significant changes in final and proposed EPA rules have been made since then (see Appendix A for those changes), so it was necessary to issue this new paper that accounts for these changes.