Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Major · Needs Congress

Bar the SEC from requiring non-material social or political disclosures

Attempted

832 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“Prohibit the SEC from requiring issuer disclosure of social, ideological, political, or “human capital” information that is not material to investors’ financial, economic, or pecuniary risks or returns. The proposed SEC climate change rule, which would quadruple the costs of being a public company, is particularly problematic.”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    The SEC proposed to rescind the climate-related disclosure rules — the rule the Mandate singles out — repealing the Securities Act and Exchange Act amendments that require registrants to provide climate information in registration statements and annual reports. Re-checked on 2026-09-06: it is still a proposal. A Federal Register API search of every SEC document published since 2026-01-01 for "climate-related disclosure" returns three, of which this is the only rulemaking on the rescission; no final rescission has been published, the climate rules are still on the books, and Congress has enacted nothing barring the SEC from requiring non-material disclosure.

  2. Attempted

    The SEC formally withdrew fourteen proposed rules issued between 2022 and 2023, stating it "does not intend to issue final rules with respect to these proposals." Among them was Enhanced Disclosures by Certain Investment Advisers and Investment Companies About Environmental, Social and Governance Investment Practices — the ESG disclosure proposal. This kills a pending social-disclosure requirement for advisers and funds, but not for issuers, and it is the Commission's own choice rather than the prohibition the Mandate asks Congress for.

  3. Attempted

    The Commission voted to end its defense of the climate-related disclosure rules. Its own announcement: "The Securities and Exchange Commission today voted to end its defense of the rules requiring disclosure of climate-related risks and greenhouse gas emissions", and "[f]ollowing today's Commission vote, SEC staff sent a letter to the court stating that the Commission withdraws its defense of the rules and that Commission counsel are no longer authorized to advance the arguments in the brief the Commission had filed", yielding its oral-argument time back to the Eighth Circuit in Iowa v. SEC, No. 24-1522. Walking away from the litigation is not rescinding the rule: the release says in terms that the rules were adopted on 2024-03-06 and remain challenged, and Commissioner Crenshaw's dissent the same day — "we are apparently letting the Climate-Related Disclosures Rule stand but are withdrawing from its defense in court" — makes the same point from the other side. Still `attempted`, and still not the statutory prohibition the Quote asks Congress for.

  4. Attempted

    Acting Chairman Uyeda announced that he had "directed the Commission staff to notify the Court of the changed circumstances and request that the Court not schedule the case for argument" in the Eighth Circuit litigation over the climate-related disclosure rules — the rule this Quote singles out. He gave his reasons in terms the Quote would recognize: the Commission was "without statutory authority or expertise" to address climate change and "this [R]ule is climate regulation promulgated under the Commission's seal". This is the first in-window step against the rule, and it is a step in litigation: the rule stayed on the books and the Commission had not proposed to rescind it.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The ask is a statutory prohibition on the SEC (requires_congress is true). No bill of the 119th Congress does that; what has happened is the Commission declining to use the authority. That is why both events are attempted rather than partial: nothing is finally off the books, and the Commission could reverse course at will.
  • The March 2025 decision was read, and it is Evidence, not a lead (read-queue ticket 08, 2026-09-06). The earlier note said “sec.gov returns HTTP 403 to every automated fetch, so no press release could be read”. That was a measurement of the wrong rung: sec.gov refuses a bare curl and a browser User-Agent and answers 200 with full content to the full Chrome header set. Press Release 2025-58, SEC Votes to End Defense of Climate Disclosure Rules (https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-58), opens on that rung and is now the Evidence for the 2025-03-27 event. So does the preceding step, Acting Chairman Uyeda’s statement of 2025-02-11. The 2026-06-03 proposal is the first Federal Register record of the retreat; it was never the first record.
  • How far the sec.gov negative reaches. All 581 press releases and speeches and statements the Commission published in 2025 and 2026 (216 statements and 146 releases for 2025, 134 and 85 for 2026) were enumerated from sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases?year=&page= and sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements?year=&page=. The complete set bearing on this ask is: Uyeda 2025-02-11 (directing staff to notify the Eighth Circuit), Crenshaw’s dissent the same day, Press Release 2025-58 and Crenshaw’s dissent of 2025-03-27, Crenshaw on the Commission’s status report of 2025-07-23, and the three statements of 2026-05-29 accompanying the proposed rescission (Atkins, Peirce, Uyeda) with Press Release 2026-49. Nothing in the enumeration touches the “human capital” half of the Quote.
  • Adjacent and not counted: on 2025-01-30 the SEC noticed Nasdaq’s repeal of its Board Diversity Listing Requirement as immediately effective (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-01932/self-regulatory-organizations-the-nasdaq-stock-market-llc-notice-of-filing-and-immediate). That repeal followed the Fifth Circuit’s vacatur of the rule in December 2024 — a court outcome that predates the window, carried out by an exchange rather than by the Commission.
  • Nothing in the window addresses the “human capital” half of the Quote; no human-capital management disclosure rule was ever adopted, so there is nothing to rescind.
Action
restrict
Object
SEC authority to require social, ideological, political, or “human capital” disclosure
ID
2142