"The EPA’s bid to shift the way it calculates regulatory costs and benefits could spread to other agencies, and any such efforts would help the Trump administration fulfill its agenda to roll back rules, analysts say.

Limiting the positives of a rule by discounting its “co-benefits"—as the Environmental Protection Agency proposed last month with its mercury emissions regulation—allows agencies to tweak their regulations in ways that are friendlier to those covered by them.

Co-benefits are the added, indirect advantages brought on by a regulation.

“If people at EPA find it appealing, people at other agencies might find it appealing as well,” said Janet McCabe, who headed the department’s air and radiation office under President Barack Obama. “I would expect that other agencies would follow EPA’s lead in narrowing the benefits and broadening the costs of regulations that impose requirements on private-sector actors.”"

Stephen Lee reports for Bloomberg Environment January 22, 2019. [2]