WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, Michael Regan, former secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, will be sworn in as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
In response, Safer Chemicals Healthy Families Director Liz Hitchcock issued the following statement:
“As Michael Regan takes the reins at EPA, we urge him to get right to work using all the available tools to protect our families and communities from dangerous toxic chemicals.
When Congress passed long-awaited reforms to the Toxic Substances Control Act in 2016, they set EPA on a path to take action to protect the public from the dangers of new chemicals and those already on the market. We hope that Mr. Regan and the EPA staff will not only make up the ground that has been lost over the past four years, but will move aggressively to use the authorities and responsibilities in the law to keep our families and communities safe from chemicals like asbestos and methylene chloride.
Coming from North Carolina, Mr. Regan is well familiar with the damage that PFAS chemicals have caused in communities across the country. We look forward to working with him and the EPA staff to end uses of these ‘forever chemicals’ and start cleaning up the damage that has been resulted from their use.”