EPA & PFAS Managers
The PFAS Strategic Roadmap commits EPA to action across every program office — SDWA, CERCLA, RCRA, NPDES, TSCA, FIFRA. The April 2024 CERCLA designation of PFOA/PFOS opens Section 107 cost-recovery across what may be 50,000 to 200,000 impacted sites nationwide. The NPDWR brings roughly 66,000 public water systems into the compliance population. No conventional contracting model scales to a federal portfolio of this size. MAGNET4WATER is built for multi-tier, multi-scale program execution — on the engines EPA, USGS, and USDA already built and validated.
Enforceable MCLs for six PFAS compounds, effective 2027. Roughly 66,000 public water systems are in the monitoring population. An estimated 6–10% will exceed the MCLs — each requiring source identification, capture-zone analysis, and treatment planning on a tight implementation timeline.
EPA's April 2024 designation of PFOA and PFOS as CERCLA hazardous substances opens Section 107 cost-recovery and Section 104 cleanup authority. The federal site portfolio could expand into the tens of thousands of locations — with EPA needing methodology that survives both administrative review and the case law still being written.
A multi-year cross-program commitment with annual updates and Congressional reporting. Implementation accountability rests on quantitative analysis from every Region, every state partner, every Center. Methodology inconsistency across the federal portfolio is now a Congressional-oversight risk, not just a technical concern.
The 2023-final TSCA reporting rule requires a comprehensive industry-wide PFAS-use inventory. First reporting period 2025. The resulting dataset will reshape federal-state-tribal source identification and TMDL allocation across the regulated universe.
Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, California, and others have set stricter MCLs or broader compound coverage than the federal NPDWR. EPA's coordination challenge: methodology consistency across primacy-state, non-primacy-state, and tribal lands — with different numerical standards in different jurisdictions.
$5B in IIJA-dedicated PFAS funding flowing through state revolving funds. EPA approves state Intended Use Plans. Allocation defensibility requires quantitative source-attribution and risk-prioritization on methodology that survives state and Congressional scrutiny.
These pressures land on the same EPA staff in the same year, across Regions and Offices that were already operating at capacity. The analytic infrastructure supporting the Roadmap cannot be a hundred different state contractor deliverables in twenty-five different file formats.
What Sets MAGNET Apart
Four architectural decisions specific to federal program management at PFAS-portfolio scale.
The Strategic Roadmap meets its implementation infrastructure.
The PFAS Strategic Roadmap commits EPA to action across OW, OLEM, ORD, OCSPP, OECA, and every Region. Implementation requires modeling infrastructure that operates at the scale of the commitment — not a single-site modeling tool used in spreadsheets at portfolio scale. MAGNET is the multi-tier, multi-scale framework: screening through intermediate through deep analysis, same engines at every level, consistent methodology from one site to fifty thousand.
EPA's engines. USGS's engines. USDA's engines. All of them.
ConduitNET runs EPA EPANET. StormNET runs EPA SWMM (FEMA-approved for NFIP). IGW-NET runs USGS MODFLOW 6 plus MT3DMS reactive transport, MODPATH particle tracking, SEAWAT variable-density flow, T-PROGS geostatistics, UCODE calibration. SwaNET runs USDA SWAT. The federal science establishment built these engines, validates them, and uses them daily. MAGNET wraps each one in a cloud-native, data-centric, real-time platform — without altering the underlying physics.
Tens of thousands of sites. Triaged at federal scale.
Multi-tier vertical depth (screening → intermediate → deep, same engines throughout). Multi-scale horizontal portfolio (consistent methodology across one site to thousands). The architectural pattern Michigan EGLE used to deliver statewide wellhead protection for approximately $30M in documented savings. The pattern Allegan County used to risk-prioritize 351 PFAS and LUST sites in under a year. The same architecture, applied at federal scale, addresses the EPA PFAS portfolio.
Federation, transparency, and the federal data fabric.
DataNET provides federated WMS/WFS/WCS access to USGS NWIS, EPA inventories, state monitoring networks, NOAA climate forcing, tribal data sources — the data ecosystem EPA's Strategic Roadmap calls for. The Observatory architecture supports multi-agency coordination with confidential and public publication modes. One platform supporting EPA Headquarters, Regional offices, state partners, tribal programs, and the public-facing record — without separate consultant deliverables for each.
PFAS analysis spans physically distinct domains. Each MAGNET platform handles its domain on the federal-agency engine built for that physics — coupled through documented handoffs of physically-meaningful quantities.
MAGNET4WATER is an analytic infrastructure for water modeling. It supports EPA program execution, Regional implementation, state and tribal partner coordination, CERCLA cost-recovery analysis, NPDWR compliance analysis, and capture-zone defensibility — on federal-standard engines. It does not make regulatory decisions, conduct enforcement, or substitute for EPA's statutory and policy roles. What it adds is the multi-tier, multi-scale modeling environment that federal program management at PFAS-portfolio scale has been missing — methodology consistency across Regions, states, and tribal lands, on engines the federal science establishment already endorses.
Pain Points & MAGNET Solutions
NPDWR implementation at scale
MAGNET: IGW-NET with MODFLOW 6 + MT3DMS + MODPATH for capture-zone delineation and source attribution at every exceeding system. ConduitNET (EPA EPANET) for treatment-planning support. Methodology consistency across states, primacy and non-primacy, with EPA Regional oversight on the same underlying analysis — not fifty different state contractor deliverables.
CERCLA cost-recovery portfolio triage
MAGNET: MODFLOW 6 + MT3DMS reactive transport with sorption and decay; MODPATH particle tracking for source attribution; T-PROGS heterogeneous-K realizations for fracture-controlled and karst geology. Capture-zone and source-attribution analysis on USGS engines the federal science establishment already endorses — with the audit trail and reproducibility cost-recovery defense requires.
State-federal-tribal coordination
MAGNET: One platform, one methodology, multiple partners. State PFAS programs work in the same environment as EPA Regions; tribal programs operate with sovereign access; federated data fabric pulls each jurisdiction's monitoring networks alongside USGS NWIS. The Observatory enables joint analysis with confidential modes for pre-decisional work and public modes for the federal record.
DWSRF/CWSRF allocation defensibility
MAGNET: The portfolio triage architecture Allegan County used for 351 sites in under a year, applied at state-program scale. Risk prioritization on consistent methodology with documented audit trail. State IUP submissions backed by quantitative analysis EPA Regional review can verify against the same engines — not narrative justifications that can't be reproduced.
NPDES PFAS provisions & effluent guidelines
MAGNET: StormNET (EPA SWMM) for urban NPS analysis; SwaNET (USDA SWAT) for watershed-scale loading; IGW-NET for groundwater pathways. TMDL development on integrated platforms with documented methodology. Effluent guideline justification on the engines EPA itself maintains — with the methodology coherence that survives administrative appeal.
Strategic Roadmap reporting & oversight readiness
MAGNET: Methodology consistency across the federal portfolio with documented audit trail at every site. Same model, same engines, same data, every Region. AI-generated explanatory reports grounded in the actual model files for public-record publication. The Observatory infrastructure delivers what Strategic Roadmap reporting requires — reproducible analysis that survives the year's GAO investigation, not the consultant-deliverable model that fails it.
Strategic Value
For EPA program managers, Regional implementation leads, state partners, and tribal environmental programs, the architectural commitments translate into three dimensions: regulatory defensibility — federal-standard methodology surviving CERCLA enforcement, NPDES permit appeals, judicial review, and the capital-markets scrutiny that PFAS rulemaking now attracts; federal-state-tribal coordination — one platform, one methodology, multiple partners, defensible across all of them, with confidential and public publication modes for the work that requires each; and portfolio-scale program execution — the multi-tier, multi-scale architecture that addresses the Strategic Roadmap's federal-portfolio scope on consistent methodology with documented audit trail.
When Michigan EGLE (an EPA Region 5 partner) replaced site-by-site contracting with a unified MAGNET deployment for statewide wellhead protection, the documented savings reached approximately $30M. Allegan County risk-prioritized 351 PFAS and LUST sites in under one year on the same architectural pattern. The same approach, scaled to federal PFAS portfolio management, is the response the Strategic Roadmap's implementation requires.
Proven for Federal-Scale Program Work
Three deployments demonstrating the architectural patterns federal PFAS program management requires: state-program analog at scale, PFAS portfolio triage, federal-scale contamination response.
$30M
Michigan EGLE
Statewide wellhead protection delineation across community water systems — EPA Region 5 partner; the methodology pattern federal-scale program management runs on
351
Allegan County
PFAS and LUST sites screened and risk-prioritized in <1 year — the closest documented analog to EPA's federal PFAS-portfolio triage challenge
Superfund
BP Federal Site
Complex contamination remediation from concept to commissioned infrastructure — analog for the federal-scale work CERCLA cost-recovery enables
PFAS is persistent — and that is precisely why prioritization across the federal portfolio of impacted sites matters more than the act of designation itself. The challenge is not whether to act; it is how to make defensible decisions about where finite federal resources go. The strategic argument for why the water-resources digital transformation moment is now is the same argument behind the Strategic Roadmap: the multi-tier, multi-scale framework is the only viable response at this scale.
Read: The Inflection Point →