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When writing environmental rules, one of the most important calculations involves weighing the financial costs against any gains in human life and health. The formulas are complex, but the bottom line is that reducing the emphasis on health makes it tougher to justify a rule. Last week the Trump administration took a crucial step toward de-emphasizing the life and health benefits in this calculus when the Environmental Protection Agency said it would rethink a major regulation that restricts mercury emissions by coal-burning power plants. (Davenport and Friedman, 9/7)

Republican and Democratic lawmakers pressed the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday to act faster to bring more of the country's most hazardous industrial chemicals and substances under tighter regulation, saying agency action on the health risks was "bogged down." The hearing by a House environment subcommittee focused on one of the biggest rapidly emerging health threats to public water systems, a family of widely used industrial coatings now linked to some cancers and to development problems in children, among other health risks. (9/6)

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has left it to Congress to decide whether states can use federal funds to purchase firearms for their schools, prompting congressional Democrats to begin a last-ditch effort to restrict those funds. Conservatives said Ms. DeVos’s stance was consistent with her championing of local school control. But Democrats and advocates denounced her decision as a tacit endorsement of federally funded firearms in schools, and federal policy experts saw the move as an abdication of the department’s core function to help districts navigate the federal bureaucracy. (Green, 9/6)

A series of attacks with a microwave weapon is the latest theory for what could have sickened or distressed roughly two dozen people associated with the U.S. Embassy in Cuba over the past two years. This hypothesis, advanced in recent days in several news reports, dominated a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on Cuba policy Thursday afternoon. But a panel of State Department officials said there is still no explanation for the reported injuries. (Kaplan and Achenbach, 9/6)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says new guidance about added sugars that will provide an alternate labeling option for pure maple syrup and honey will be released next year. The agency announced months ago that it was considering requiring pure maple syrup and honey to be labeled as containing “added sugars.” Members of the industries that produce those products protested the labels, saying they would be misleading and unfair. (9/6)