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Compliance with the Clean Water Act (CWA) clearly involves environmental justice (EJ) concerns. Communities with wastewater discharging facilities that fail to comply with CWA requirements are vulnerable to an array of water quality-related issues, e.g., contaminated drinking water sources. This vulnerability commonly correlates with EJ-related characteristics, such as income, race, ethnicity, and educational attainment. Establishing a statistical link from these local community characteristics to CWA compliance provides evidence that EJ factors may be in play. However, this simple link does not reveal the causal channels by which variation in local community characteristics leads to variation in compliance outcomes. This study examines the causal channels of regulatory interventions – inspections and enforcement actions (informal and formal) – designed to induce compliance with CWA requirements. Local community characteristics may shape these regulatory decisions in various ways. Agencies may purposefully increase their regulatory pressure on wastewater discharging facilities located in or near EJ communities in order to improve surface water quality in these communities. Alternatively, agencies may base their regulatory intervention decisions on the pressure exerted by an array of political actors (prominent local community members, local community organizations, locally elected politicians, etc.). This array of political pressure most likely reflects the distribution of political power that disadvantages EJ communities. Put differently, rich, white, non-Hispanic, and well-educated communities may more effectively convince agencies to take regulatory actions to induce better CWA compliance, thereby, improving surface water quality in these communities by reducing wastewater discharges. To identify the causal role of regulatory interventions, this study provides the following key forms of analysis. First, the study estimates the effects of EJ-related local community characteristics on facility-specific CWA compliance outcomes, which reflects the overall link from EJ elements to compliance. Second, the study estimates the effects of EJ-related local community characteristics on facility-specific intervention decisions made by federal and state agencies responsible for ensuring compliance with CWA requirements. Assessment of these estimated effects affirms whether or not EJ-related elements seem to shape agency decisions. If not, the set of causal channels linking EJ-related elements to CWA compliance does not seem to include a role for regulatory interventions. Third, the study re-estimates the effects of EJ-related local community characteristics on facility-specific CWA compliance outcomes after including regulatory interventions as control factors. If the set of interventions – inspections and enforcement actions – serve as meaningful causal channels, then inclusion of these interventions as control factors should meaningfully reduce the magnitudes of the EJ-related coefficients on income, race, ethnicity, and educational attainment. Moreover, if interventions represent the only causal channels, then the statistical significance of the EJ-related coefficients should evaporate.