President-elect Joe Biden will reportedly nominate Michael S. Regan, who heads the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, as the next Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, according to the Washington Post.
Regan previously served at the EPA under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, working on air quality and energy issues. Before leaving the agency in 2008, Regan served as a national program manager responsible for designing initiatives aimed at reducing pollution and market-based solutions to improve energy efficiency, air quality and climate-related challenge
Recent Trump administration rollbacks have included scaling back automobile fuel-efficiency standards and emissions limits for coal-burning plants, as well as lifting Obama-era limits on methane released from new oil and gas wells. Regan would play a central role in realizing Biden’s promises to reverse those, combat climate change, embrace green energy and enforce environmental regulations.
Regan has served as North Carolina’s top environmental official since early 2017, when Gov. Roy Cooper (D) named him to his role. During that time, he forged a tough multibillion-dollar settlement over a coal ash cleanup with Duke Energy, established an environmental justice advisory board and reached across the political divide to work with the state’s Republican legislature.
In his current role, Regan oversees roughly 1,600 employees and seven regional offices across the state. If confirmed, Regan would inherit an agency nearly 10 times the size of his current one – and one that has consistently found itself in the middle of a political tug-of-war over how it should exercise its authority to clean up pollution and combat climate change.
Before entering state government, Regan worked as southeast regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group, where he focused on lessening the impacts of climate change on the region, as well as on improving air quality in polluted communities.
In 2016, he founded a consulting firm, M. Regan & Associates, aimed at helping “organizations find transformational solutions to complex energy, environmental and economic challenges.”
A native of Goldsboro, N.C., Regan studied earth and environmental science at N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University and later earned a master’s degree in public administration from George Washington University.