Regan is a leading proponent of using ballot initiatives to reduce economic inequality and improve the standard of living for working people and their families:

• In response to H.R. 1, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by President Trump in 2025, which stripped roughly $100 billion from California healthcare, Regan led SEIU-UHW to qualify the California Billionaire Tax Act (Prop 40), a one-time tax on the state’s billionaires to protect healthcare funding, for the November 2026 ballot. More than 1.6 million Californians signed the petition to get the Billionaire Tax Act on the ballot, nearly twice the number required to qualify, making it one of the strongest citizen-led ballot qualification efforts in California history.

• In 2015, Regan led SEIU-UHW leaders to provide startup funding for a nationwide organization, The Fairness Project, which is working with state partners across the country to file ballot initiatives to raise wages and expand healthcare access in red and purple states. With ongoing support from SEIU-UHW, The Fairness Project has won 39 ballot measure campaigns, to raise wages, stop predatory payday lenders, expand health care access, protect reproductive rights, secure more paid time off, and other life-changing policies for more than 23 million people.

• SEIU-UHW spearheaded a 2015 ballot initiative to raise California’s minimum wage to $15. In March 2016, it qualified for the November 2016 ballot, and a week later, Governor Jerry Brown credited the initiative for prompting him and the state legislature to pass a $15 minimum wage benefiting more than five million working people and their families.

Through SEIU-UHW’s United for All campaign, Regan united hospital and clinic workers across the state to tackle the healthcare staffing shortage head-on:

• In 2023, Regan led 85,000 SEIU-UHW members in negotiations to win industry-leading contracts with rising pay, expanded benefits, and staffing provisions to begin reversing the staffing crisis. Regan led 65,000 healthcare workers on successful strikes in these campaigns, including the largest healthcare worker strike in U.S. history in conjunction with the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.

• Regan led SEIU-UHW members to improve healthcare worker retention and recruitment by collecting signatures to qualify a $25/hour healthcare worker minimum wage measure in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Downey, and Inglewood in 2022. This effort led those cities to ultimately pass the measures into law, either legislatively or electorally, and paved the way for state lawmakers to successfully pass a first-in-the-nation statewide $25/hour healthcare worker minimum wage law in 2023 that benefits more than 500,000 healthcare workers.
• Also in 2022, he secured $1 billion dollars in the California legislature for a Healthcare Staffing Stabilization Bonus, providing more than 832,000 healthcare workers in California an incentive to stay in the healthcare industry.

• In 2023, Regan set out an ambitious goal to grow SEIU-UHW by 25,000 workers by 2026. To build the capacity needed to achieve this goal, he launched a series organizing bootcamps to train rank-and-file union members in organizing. Hundreds of SEIU-UHW members have since been deployed on organizing campaigns.

• Under Regan’s direction, SEIU-UHW has rapidly grown with over 8,000 workers joining the union in the past two years.

• Regan conceived and developed an innovative education-to-jobs pipeline to address the allied healthcare workforce shortage and provide an opportunity for communities of color to have greater representation in the healthcare workforce. Regan led the formation of Futuro Health, a non-profit organization that provides new workers with healthcare education and works to place them into good healthcare jobs through AlliedUP, a unique allied healthcare worker-owned staffing cooperative. The partnership between SEIU-UHW, AlliedUP Cooperative and Futuro Health is building a diverse talent pipeline to close the gap on 2.1 million open jobs and an ecosystem of empowerment for allied healthcare workers with education programs, career coaching and placement into high quality jobs.

• Since 2019, he has secured nearly $250 million for the program. Nearly 15,000 individuals have been served by Futuro Health’s tuition-free training opportunities.

• Working in partnership with healthcare employers and the state, Regan secured hundreds of millions of dollars to provide healthcare workers with childcare subsidies, hotel rooms, and other resources so they could continue to provide critical care to patients.

• He played an instrumental role in the state’s passage of laws establishing COVID exposure notification requirements, COVID sick leave, and a state-maintained PPE stockpile to ensure healthcare workers would never again be left to fend for themselves.