Michael Regan loves a good photo op. The EPA administrator spent much of his first two years in office crisscrossing the country, attracting a phalanx of local reporters wherever he turned up. But instead of welcoming veterans home or cutting the ribbon on bright and shiny bridges, the sites of Regan’s press junkets have included a community plagued by coal ash in Puerto Rico, a Louisiana area in the shadows of ­petrochemical facilities where residents face high cancer rates, and a West Virginia county with a faulty wastewater-treatment plant.

On a blistering summer day in 2022, I watched as he brought the cameras to a trailer home in the back roads of Lowndes County, Alabama, where more than 40% of residents have raw sewage on their properties. On rainy days, which are increas…