“The President will advance his climate agenda using every tool at his disposal and can make significant progress in curbing emissions, growing our economy, and good-paying union jobs. And so he could do that without Congress.” —Principal White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, October 21, 2021
“This is going to be our new normal and the effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation.” —FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell on CNN reacting to 2021’s deadly tornadoes
Unique in the Biden administration is not its regulatory activism as such, but the economy-transforming scale of the interventions in which it is willing to engage across numerous economic sectors. All the while, the president jarringly claims to be “a capitalist.”
The latest tip of this regulatory costberg is a climate disclosure rulemaking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued March 21. Reuters calls the proposed climate-risk disclosure rules “landmark;” NPR calls them “historic” while perhaps inadvertently noting their actual status as part of a “global push by regulators” in this era of reset.
The SEC’s move is just one of many prominent elements of Biden’s escalation of the regulatory state, wherein the legislative responsibility of Congress gets sidelined for regulation by a go-it-alone executive and the federal bureaucracies.
Given its sweeping nature, the SEC’s action to require that companies disclose their climate-related risks and confess what they’re doing about them needs to be put in context with the rest of Biden’s escalating “Whole-of-Government” agendas.
“Whole-of-government” is Biden’s phrase, in which formulation “government” refers largely to himself and his executive branch. Biden has instituted, top down, whole-of-goverment campaigns in three primary areas: “equity,” “climate crisis” and “competition.”
These three legs of Biden’s regulatory stool are intertwined, such that even the Office of Management and Budget’s regulatory oversight body has remorselessly thrown its own supervisory role aside to advance regulatory “benefits” as Biden and the progressive political agenda see them.
Whole-of-government agendas do not involve capitalism, obviously, but rather the “regulatory muscle” we’re now seeing from SEC as well as others. These unilateral agendas also rely heavily on exploiting the federal government’s procurement heft in the steering of otherwise free competitive enterprise.
Climate non-alarmists used to be disparaged as incapable of grasping the difference between climate and weather. The shoe is on the other foot with Biden’s launching of no fewer than five separate executive decrees on climate crisis amid a shift in the alarmist language to emphasize “extreme weather” rather than merely climate.
The fusion of politicized climate extremism with numerous regulatory agencies’ pursuits is reaching an apex with Biden’s blending of these with the ambiguities and unattainables of the equity pursuit. The first among equals of Biden’s three-legged whole-of-government agenda, “equity’ is embedded in every single thing his adminstration is doing and precludes limited government in its own right.
On almost equal footing with the equity push and inextricably intertwined with it, the runner-up climate agenda is heavily embedded not just in Biden’s executive actions, but also strategically so in the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure package (deemed the largest climate legislation yet to be enacted). The climate agenda also stars in what is now being called the “Bipartisan Innovation Act,” purportedly addressing competition with China but constituting instead heavy government steering and subsidies to replace free enterprise. As the name implies, Republicans are enabling this legislation advancing Biden’s “stool.”
Biden hopes to sweep up the specks of free enterprise remaining via Building a Better America, the catchall for what used to be called the Build Back Better agenda
Rooted in hobbling domestic fossil energy development rather than the promotion of high-BTU energy abundance and resilience, Biden’s whole-of-government climate crisis campaign has been embraced by multiple departments and agencies well beyond the SEC, in a lockstep obedience to the gods of energy poverty that now comprises an industry unto itself.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, for one, proclaims in its new “strategic plan” that “FEMA will take a people first approach to increase climate literacy, develop tools, and allocate resources informed by future risk estimates to target investments to create a more equitable and resilient nation.”
These “investments” involve assorted unspecified but bottomless climate and emergency “adaptation” pursuits.
As overseers like FEMA always remind us, "much remains to be done.” That “much” involves the fusion of the other top-down “whole-of-government” campaigns. FEMA asserts that “Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of disasters. Meanwhile, structural inequities in our society compound the impacts of disasters for historically underserved communities. Left unaddressed, these challenges pose unacceptable risks to the nation—and to us as emergency managers."
The FEMA report and its wokeness must be seen to be believed. Meanwhile, and hand in hand with the relentless pursuit of carbon-dioxide neutrality, the administration even calls for a “Civilian Climate Corps” with big plans to:
“...mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs. The initiative shall aim to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.”
That the very act of being anti-fossil-energy is to be is anti-equity and anti- environmental justice has never registered with ideologues populating key departments and agencies. Or perhaps it has.
The new climate-warrior mindset, as today’s developments showcase again, has taken root among the financial bureaus beyond the SEC, so here’s more of the inventory:
- The Treasury Department now hosts a “climate hub” to decide how to change the weather with spending and tax policies. Spending and taxation are increasingly regulatory, united in service to progressive ends in America; so this “hub” can have sweeping regulatory implications barely touched upon.
- The “independent” Federal Reserve, despite not being a climate regulator, rose to the climate crisis challenge with its “Climate Change and Financial Stability” report task to thwart alleged risks that climate change poses to the banking system. It backs “climate scenario analysis” in bank stress tests so that capital may be steered away from fossil energy.
- At this point it would not be surprising to know that something called the Employee Benefits Security Administration exists within the Department of Labor. Not to be left behind, this body is in pursuit of “amendments to the Investment Duties regulation under Title I of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.” Somewhat translated, the EBSA wants to to make clear to hesitant investment fund managers “that climate change and other ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] factors are often material and that in many instances fiduciaries should consider climate change and other ESG factors in the assessment of investment risks and returns.” This rule, with its catchy title of “Prudence and Loyalty in Selecting Plan Investments and Exercising Shareholder Rights,” would reallocate much investment capital in America. That’s also not capitalism.
Biden would like ESG funds to be a default option of plan administrators. Unfortunately for ESG pursuits, professors Todd Zywicki and Sanjay Baghat have examined the empirical evidence on ESG and found that, rather than ESG making companies more profitable, profitable companies spend more money on ESG and divert shareholder money to enhance public reputation.
Governmental promotion of ESG is a policy setting the stage for future economic downturns. As the three economic shocks so far in the 21st century have demonstrated, those downturns will be exploited for expanding what have now morphed into whole-of-government programs, unless measures are taken to prevent crisis abuse.
Across the board, Biden’s policies have called for agencies to “prioritize action on climate change in their policy-making and budget processes, in their contracting and procurement, and in their engagement with State, local, Tribal, and territorial governments; workers and communities; and leaders across all the sectors of our economy.”
Unsurprisingly, bodies like SEC put up little effective resistance to such. As the whole-of-government regulatory tree roots itself, attempts to uproot later—such as Donald Trump’s requiring the elimination of two rules for every significant one added—become preordained exercises in futility. An administrative state swollen by the progressives’ whole-of-government pursuits cannot be reformed. Instead, the Congress will need to act to replace it, and in fact should be busy now with a slate of remedies to enact should we find ourselves at some point unstuck from the progressive ditch.
Let’s cap off this survey of the whole of government climate crisis apparatus with one final example—and its the biggest of all. The Department of Defense, vast size and spending notwithstanding, has traditionally been left out of the regulatory cost-assessment mix. That omission was never plausible nor appropriate even before climate-cultism dominated federal policy. The reasons include the aforementioned procurement heft affecting markets, as well as its deep involvement in frontier technologies like the Internet and artificial intelligence.
A $768 defense bill was just signed in December 2021 to fund a DoD that now regards climate change as a risk to national security, and that expends some of those vast resources writing official reports on the “problem” and what to do about it.
But there’s more. As another whole-of-government climate move, the DoD in October 2021 teamed up with the General Services Administration and the National Aeronautics & Space Administration on a proposal “to ensure that major Federal agency procurements minimize the risk of climate change.” With even greater vigor, the gravitaional force of federal procurement and acquisitions will be corralled to to regulate private individuals.
As mentioned, before this latest climate-spending foray, the U.S. government was already the world’s largest purchaser of goods and services, to the tune of $500 billion a year in annual contracts. This represents a magnitude that would be damned as monopsony if anyone else were doing it, not even taking into account the coercive elements being baked into the cake.
Analysis of the hazards and folly of today’s climate alarmism is available elsewhere. The purpose here was instead to briefly underscore the perils and costs of the cross-agency embedding of the climate “crisis” agenda with other whole-of-government conceits.
These observations remind us of the already heavy amount of federal involvement in the competitive economy more generally; but they also serve as warning that whole-of-government agendas shrink the scope of free enterprise. Policymakers need to be examining the negative synergies of it all and objecting.
Closing on a lighter note, let’s just say we are gazing less at “whole-of-government” policies than staring at a gaping “hole of government” created by Congress’ “holesale” delegation of legislative powers to unelected careerists and appointees.
