Seventeen State Treasurers Just Informed the SEC Exactly How Much Damage Biden’s ESG Rule Did

Biden's SEC forced public companies to report climate risk scores that had nothing to do with making money.

Seventeen state treasurers just sent Trump's SEC a letter laying out exactly what that rule cost.

What those numbers show about the real price of that rule will make you furious.

Seventeen States Tell the SEC to Finish the Job

Marlo Oaks runs Utah's treasury, and on August 3 he put his name on a letter with sixteen other state financial officers from thirteen states.

Their message to the SEC was blunt.

Don't water down the rescission of Biden's climate disclosure rule – kill it completely.

The rule they're targeting forced every public company in America to disclose greenhouse gas emissions, "climate-related risks," severe weather events, and internal bureaucratic paperwork tracking all of it.

The SEC adopted it in March 2024, buried in the fine print of Biden's regulatory blitz.

Courts stayed it a month later after states sued, but the rule never actually died.

It just sat there, waiting for a friendlier administration to either finish killing it or bring it back from the dead.

Oaks and his colleagues aren't taking chances.

"We support the proposed rescission of the climate-related disclosure rules and urge the Commission to finalize it in full," the officials wrote.

Oaks said the move would "restore the Commission's disclosure framework to its proper, materiality-based foundation."

Translate that out of bureaucrat-speak and it means this – the SEC's job is protecting your investments, not forcing Exxon to explain its carbon footprint to satisfy Greta Thunberg's fan club.

The Number That Should Make Every Retiree Angry

The SEC's own analysis says killing this rule saves companies $7.9 billion in compliance costs up front.

Annual savings run $4.9 billion every single year for a decade.

That's not government money.

That's money companies would have spent on lawyers and consultants instead of building products, paying workers, or growing your pension fund.

Picture a mid-size oil and gas company cutting a six-figure check to a Washington consulting firm every year just to prove it filled out the right climate paperwork.

That's not a hypothetical.

That's the $7.9 billion these treasurers just added up, sitting in a filing cabinet instead of your 401k.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins already raised "questions about the Commission's authority to adopt" the 2024 rule in the first place when his agency proposed rescinding it back in May.

Jason Isaac, who runs the American Energy Institute, put it even sharper.

"Americans want the SEC focused on protecting markets and investors, not turning our capital markets into a vehicle for climate activism," Isaac said.

That's the entire scam in one sentence.

Biden's regulators never cared about your 401k.

They cared about strangling oil, gas, and traditional industries through the back door, using disclosure paperwork as the weapon since Congress would never pass their climate agenda outright.

Why This Fight Started Long Before Trump Won

This isn't the first time state officials have marched on the SEC over ESG.

Back in 2022, twenty three state financial officers sent a nearly identical letter demanding the agency put investors first instead of chasing ESG scores.

That letter went nowhere under a Biden SEC that was busy building the very rule these treasurers are now trying to bury.

Four years later, the fight is finally winnable because Trump appointed regulators who actually agree with the states instead of stonewalling them.

That's the pattern conservatives have been screaming about since 2022 – unelected bureaucrats at the SEC, the Department of Labor, and half a dozen other agencies tried to rewrite American capitalism around climate politics no voter ever approved.

Wall Street firms played along because BlackRock and its friends made billions managing ESG funds while your pension got quietly shifted into windmill projects nobody asked for.

Atkins and Trump's SEC are now ripping that machinery out root and branch, and this letter from Oaks and sixteen other treasurers is the coalition making sure nobody in Washington gets cold feet halfway through.

The next fight is already lining up over the SEC's climate-related shareholder proposal rules and DEI disclosure mandates buried in the same regulatory swamp, and these same seventeen officials will be watching every step.

Sources:

• Ben Smith, "State Officials to Trump SEC: End Biden's ESG Scheme for Good," RedState, August 10, 2026.
• "Exclusive: 17 state officials ask Trump to slash Biden-era climate rules," Blaze Media, August 2026.
• "Several state officials demand feds protect Americans' retirement plans by clearly regulating ESG investments," Fox Business, 2026.
• Stacey Lennox, "23 State Financial Officers Demand the SEC Put Investors First, Not ESG Scores," PJ Media, June 23, 2022.
• "SEC Proposes Rescission of Climate-Related Disclosure Rules," Gibson Dunn, May 2026.
• "ESG Investing Promises More than It Delivers," The Heritage Foundation.