A new paper by three economists, published Thursday in the journal Science, challenges how the Environmental Protection Agency has justified repealing a 2015 water protection rule and contends that the Trump administration ignored hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits the regulation would have produced each year.

 

But EPA officials, including a career official overseeing the agency’s National Center for Environmental Economics, counter that Obama administration officials ignored warnings that they had used unreliable and outdated studies when calculating the regulation.

 

The dueling analyses of the rule, known as Waters of the United States, underscore how fraught scientific and economic data has become in recent years. In June, the agency proposed rescinding WOTUS, which formally extended federal jurisdiction over roughly 60 percent of U.S. water bodies, and announced that it would draft a replacement.

 

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