The Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Departments fought for months over the extent to which the Trump administration’s plan to roll back clean car rules would save consumers’ lives.
The EPA had disagreed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on the number of deaths that the Trump clean car rules would avoid by rolling back fuel-efficiency and emission targets set by the previous administration, according to hundreds of pages of documents released Tuesday.
The proposed rule to implement the Trump plan was released earlier this month by both agencies, aiming to keep the vehicle fuel efficiency rules from becoming more stringent as the Obama administration had required.
The agencies justified the roll back by saying the reduced regulatory burden would lower the cost of buying new cars, and therefore encourage consumers to buy new, safer vehicles.
The joint fuel-efficiency proposal says that nearly 1,000 traffic fatalities would be stopped annually compared with the current standards. The rules would freeze the fuel-efficiency increases for new cars at 37 miles per gallon by 2020, compared with the staggered increases through 2025 that the previous administration had outlined.
EPA had argued that annual traffic fatalities would increase in the U.S. by an average of about 17 deaths per year, according to correspondence with the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The internal fighting over the number of deaths the rules would avert and cause was detailed in internal documents added to the proposed rule’s docket on Tuesday.
