WASHINGTON — The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday advanced Michael Regan’s nomination to lead the EPA.
The bipartisan 14-6 vote bodes well for the nomination as it heads to the full Senate.
Committee Chairman Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., said just before the vote that Regan has brought people together in his role as secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.
“He’s fully capable of doing that again as EPA administrator, working with all of us to address climate change and protect our air, our water, our natural resources, while helping to create good-paying jobs for the American people and strengthening our economy,” Carper said. “And he’s going to make sure that all of our communities and neighbors can be part of that progress.”
Regan would be the first Black man to lead the 50-year-old agency that will be at the heart of the new administration’s ambitious environmental agenda, including its efforts to address climate change.
The committee’s 10 Democrats all voted in favor of the nomination, along with four Republican members. A couple of the GOP senators who voted against the nomination praised Regan himself, but questioned how much authority he would have as administrator.
“As an individual, he is absolutely the type of person that I would like to see leading a federal agency,” the panel’s top Republican, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, said.
While praising Regan as a thoughtful and forthright public servant, Capito criticized other members of the administration such as White House domestic climate change adviser Gina McCarthy.
Capito said she fears McCarthy and others in the administration want to return to the kinds of regulations implemented under President Barack Obama such as the Clean Power Plan and Waters of the United States.
Those policies were intended to reduce the nation’s air and water pollution, but prompted complaints from industry that they were overly burdensome.
Capito said those types of regulations left deep economic scars in areas of her state and that she had to oppose Regan because he declined to rule out re-instating them. She also pointed to energy-related executive orders already being signed by Biden as evidence that the agenda will be set at the White House rather than the agency.
“I hope that if confirmed he will stand up to those who work to implement policies that leave behind working families in energy-producing states like mine,” Capito said of Regan.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., responded to Capito after the vote, citing the deep economic pain that’s threatened by climate change.
“What we’re doing to this planet with carbon emissions portends permanent scarring of our oceans, permanent scarring of the fisheries that Rhode Islanders depend on, permanent scarring of our very coastline,” Whitehouse said.
Carper offered that he’s already had conversations with Capito and others about “doing something real” for job creation in particularly hard-hit states such as West Virginia, where he was born.
For starters, he cited the possibility of a multi-day workshop in the near future to examine the issue.
“It’s very sad, if you go there, to see what has happened to the economy in the communities in which my sister and I were born and raised,” Carper said.
