Ethically Challenged EPA Bids Farewell to Administrator Regan

Could he join one of the groups that benefited from the Biden Greendoggle?

Michael Regan stepped down as Administrator of the Biden-Harris Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on December 31. Mr. Regan hasn’t announced his plans, but the 48-year-old certainly has options. He might join one of the many environmental activist groups awash in taxpayer cash sluiced through the EPA on his watch. The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) – aka “Greendoggle” – which funneled billions to organizations tied to friends, former colleagues, and political allies of the Biden-Harris administration and the agency’s notoriously whirling revolving door ensure Mr. Regan would have a warm welcome anywhere in the climate special interest industry.

There certainly is precedent: David Hayes, the former White House Special Assistant to the President for Climate Policy. Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed an ethics complaint against Hayes in June 2024 calling for an investigation into Hayes’ role when the EPA doled out $5 billion in Greendoggle cash to an organization on whose board Hayes serves. The House Committee on Energy and Finance also was interested. That was far from the only ethically dubious incident involving the EPA under Mr. Regan’s leadership.

There was also Melissa Hoffer, the EPA’s principal deputy general counsel. Hoffer joined the EPA in January 2021 after serving in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, then left the EPA in December 2022 to become Massachusetts’ “climate czar.” She was required by federal ethics law to notify the EPA’s ethics office within three business days of any agreement or negotiations about employment with any nonfederal entity. Hoffer’s negotiations with Massachusetts began on November 28, 2022, but were not made known to the EPA ethics office until December 16, and she didn’t complete the notification until December 27, 2022 — nearly a month after her negotiations with Massachusetts started.

The Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation (OAR), Joseph Goffman, served at EPA during the Obama administration, left for Harvard Law School and came back to head OAR under Biden. Goffman is unique in drawing three separate ethics complaints from PPT and criticism from Congressional leaders. He admittedly violated his recusal from matters involving Harvard, delayed in divesting from several financial holdings, and was involved in dispensing Greendoggle cash.  An EPA Inspector General investigation found Goffman violated his ethics obligations and referred him to federal prosecutors, but the Biden-Harris DOJ wasn’t interested.

Perhaps Mr. Regan can follow the example of David Batson, the EPA’s former Senior Alternative Dispute Resolution Specialist. PPT filed a complaint regarding Batson’s deep involvement in a controversial, near-$2 billion Superfund cleanup project. Whistleblower information, publicly available documents, media reports, and court filings indicated that Batson was involved with a New Jersey Superfund site both during his EPA tenure and after he left in 2015 – an apparent violation of the “Lifetime Ban” on former federal employees’ involvement with issues they dealt with while in government. In 2022, the EPA entered a consent decree with 85 entities accused of polluting the Lower Passaic River. The entities agreed to pay $150 million — less than 10 percent of the estimated $1.8 billion total cleanup costs — raising concern from New Jersey leadership that the more than $1 billion gap “will likely fall onto the taxpayers.” Lucky for Batson, he still had friends in the EPA Ethics office, who dismissed the complaint and left out some important facts, forcing PPT to file a supplemental complaint.

“Wherever Mr. Regan lands next, I hope for his sake that ethics has a higher priority than it had at the EPA while he ran it,” said PPT Director Michael Chamberlain. “Billions of taxpayer dollars plus incestuous relationships with special interest groups and an agency ethics department run on nods and winks are just more reasons why the government has almost completely lost the American public’s trust. But that was the Biden-Harris EPA under his leadership.”

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