Public health, safety, and environmental regulation, launched with optimism during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, survived the deregulatory impulses of the early Reagan years and the Gingrich era. Sometimes called “lifesaving” regulation for short, these rules differ from curative medicine because they do not seek to improve the health of identifiable individuals. Unlike an effort to save a trapped coal miner or a patient dying from kidney disease, administrative law saves lives by reducing small probabilities of premature death, injury, or illness among large numbers of anonymous workers, consumers, travelers, and residents. The names of those whose lives will be saved are unknown when the rule is adopted and may never be known. They are sometimes called “statistical lives.”

Thanks to advances in probability research and statistics, we now know that federal lifesaving regulations do save lives, and there is no basis for believing that these lives are any less real than the lives saved by physicians and nurses in emergency rooms. Although the evaluation literature is not as comprehensive and robust as one would prefer, there is a variety of studies showing that specific federal rules (or combinations of rules) have saved lives, and, in fact, such rules now account for a majority of the major rules issued each year by the U.S. federal government.