Hanger has served as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, a position he held between September 2008 and January 2011 under then-Governor Ed Rendell.
(Clifford Jones served as the Chair of the Public Utility Commission and Secretary of the Department of Environmental Resources, the predecessor of DEP.)
Hanger was born in Nairobi, Kenya, to British parents who then moved to Dublin, Ireland and then to the United States when he was ten years old.
[7] Hanger was the founding President of Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future or PennFuture from 1998 to 2008, a public interest organization with the objective of improving the environment and economy.
After saying that he was "seriously looking"[9] at a possible campaign for Governor of Pennsylvania to seek the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican incumbent Tom Corbett in 2014,[9] he officially announced his candidacy for the office in November 2012.