Michael Regan during his nomination hearing in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, February 3, 2021 (Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty)

The new head of the Environmental Protection Agency Administration assures, “Science is back at the EPA.”

Michael Regan, confirmed by the Senate last week, told the Washington Post of his immediate task to revive the agency after it was battered by the denial of climate change and denigration of science by Donald Trump and his inner circle.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, starting with rebuilding the staff morale and getting all of our staff back to feeling as if they matter, their voices matter.

We really have to restore the scientific integrity and the utilization of data, of facts, as we move forward and make some very important decisions.

Throughout its four years, the Trump Administration stripped environmental protections. It gutted Obama-era measures over waterways and vehicle emissions; sought to remove the limits on release of arsenic, lead, and mercury from coal plants into water supplies; removed restrictions on fossil fuel pollution, including emissions of methane; withdrew rules over asbestos and pesticides; and weakened the Endangered Species Act

The Administration also curbed any mention of climate change by Government agencies and scientists, placing climate change sceptics and fossil fuel lobbyists at the heads of agencies, including former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler as EPA Administrator.

In contrast, Regan has set out objectives such as a shift to cleaner forms of energy, investments in communities suffering from decades of pollution, and improvement in air and water quality.

See also “Climate Day in the White House”: Biden Addresses Crisis with New Orders

To do that, he will have to help rebuild an EPA where almost 1,600 staff left in the first 18 months of the Trump Administration and fewer than 400 were hired. The workforce fell to 14,172, the agency’s lowest since the Reagan Administration in the 1980s.

Regan was in the EPA for more than 10 years during the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations. He then served as the director in the southeast US for the Environmental Defense Fund, and as the secretary of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality.

I’m under the assumption that there are a lot of people that walked out of EPA that would be extremely qualified for some of the positions we’ve advertised, and we welcome their return if they meet the criteria. But that doesn’t exclude new and young scientists and engineers and data analysts and lawyers who have been longing to join a credible agency.

Reviving EPA After “Political Interference”

Without setting out any specific initial politics, the 44-year-old Regan indicated that he will support the return of state environmental regulations barred by the Trump Administration. They included the limits on auto emissions in California, the fifth-largest economy in the world.

He told the Post, “I’m definitely a fan of statutory authority, and states’ rights and autonomy. The transportation sector is very important in our greenhouse gas goals.”

The Administrator welcomed the “clean slate”, from a federal court decision vacating the Trump Administration’s replacement of the Clean Power Plan, to regulate pollution and climate warming from coal and gas plants.

And he said that the EPA will review chemicals, linked to damaging effects on health, after the Trump Administration blocked regulation of their use.

Just after the Biden Administration took office, the EPA removed a toxicity assessment of the 2forever chemicals”. Regan said the study was “compromised by political interference”.

That’s just one example of many decisions that were made by the previous administration that weren’t guided by the scientific evidence nor the recommendations made by our career staff.