- environment
- regulator
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is the federal environmental regulator. It writes the national rules under statutes like the Clean Water Act and CERCLA, runs the public data systems the platform relies on — ECHO, the TRI, and the RSEI model built on it — and retains direct authority over federal programs and facilities.
Much of the day-to-day permitting and enforcement, though, is delegated: the EPA sets the floor and a state agency like the Ohio EPA issues the permits and brings most of the cases. That division is why a facility's record usually has both a federal and a state layer, and why the platform reads EPA data as the neutral national baseline while treating a state agency's actions as the operative local decisions.