EPA Chief Michael Regan Wants to Advance Environmental Justice

Michael Regan loves a good photo op. The EPA administrator spent much of his first two years in office crisscrossing the country, attracting a phalanx of local reporters wherever he turned up. But instead of welcoming veterans home or cutting the ribbon on bright and shiny bridges, the sites of Regan’s press junkets have included a community plagued by coal ash in Puerto Rico, a Louisiana area in the shadows of ­petrochemical facilities where residents face high cancer rates, and a West Virginia county with a faulty wastewater-treatment plant.

On a blistering summer day in 2022, I watched as he brought the cameras to a trailer home in the back roads of Lowndes County, Alabama, where more than 40% of residents have raw sewage on their properties. On rainy days, which are increasing in severity as a result of climate change, the sewage often backs up into people’s showers and sinks. Regan sat with a resident in front of a pool of raw sewage, seemingly unperturbed by the smell or the gargantuan bugs flying nearby on that humid morning. “We have a mission,” he said. “No one in America in 2022 should have to have a hole in their backyard where waste flows in the very places that our children play.”

Read More: Sanitation Problems Have Plagued Black Residents of an Alabama County for Decades. The Government Might Finally Do Something About It

Later that day, in an air-conditioned meeting hall, he shared the dais with a member of Congress, a state environmental administrator, and other Biden Administration officials to announce a new commitment of federal dollars to tackle the issue. The town hall couldn’t avoid an airing of the grievances and allegations that lurked just beneath the surface: past money had been misspent by government officials; residents need to be willing to pay for the costs of better sanitation; it’s too hard for local communities to access federal funds. Regan observed quietly, before ­chiming in to make peace. “This is a…