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

30. Federal Trade Commission · Notable

Create an FTC ESG/DEI collusion task force

Partially done

873 30. Federal Trade Commission

“The FTC should set up an ESG/DEI collusion task force to investigate firms—particularly in private equity—to see if they are using the practice as a means to meet targets, fix prices, or reduce output.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The FTC brought its own case on the theory the Quote describes: a complaint and proposed order against WPP, Publicis and Dentsu alleging that the agencies colluded through trade associations to impose a common "Brand Safety Floor" that demonetized disfavoured viewpoints, distorting competition in ad buying. The function the Mandate wanted a task force for — investigating firms for using ESG-style commitments to coordinate and restrict output — is being performed, by the Bureau of Competition rather than by a task force, and private equity, the sector the Quote singles out, has not been examined. **Confirmed against the Commission's own documents on 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07):** the FTC has created two task forces in the window and neither is this one — a Joint Labor Task Force drawn from the three bureaus and the Office of Policy Planning, and a Food Supply Chain Security Task Force — and the string "ESG" appears **zero** times in the 1,026-line FY 2027 Congressional Budget Justification. The organization chart last updated 2026-09-03 shows no task force of any kind.

  2. Attempted

    The FTC, with the DOJ Antitrust Division, filed a Statement of Interest supporting a multistate antitrust case alleging that BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard used their shareholdings to push competing coal producers to cut output as part of a Net Zero ESG initiative. Chairman Ferguson framed it as the Commission's answer to "the left's attempt to corrupt financial markets with political and social objectives". It is a filing in someone else's case, not an FTC investigation, and no task force was created.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The named object — a task force — does not exist. The FTC created a Joint Labor Task Force (2025-02-26) and a Healthcare Task Force (2026-03-26) and no ESG/DEI one; an ftc.gov press-release search for task force across the window returns those and nothing else. partial follows §3’s “achieved by a different instrument that covers only some of it”, and §3b’s rule that the test is what happened to the functions. The alternative reading — not started, because the Quote names an organizational form and no such body exists — is in the spot-check register.
  • Related but not counted here: the FTC’s consent order in the Omnicom/IPG merger (2025-06-23) barring coordination to steer advertising away from publishers on ideological grounds, and the Havas agreement of 2026-06-30. Those are leveled on #2240 and #2241.
  • The multistate case (Texas et al. v. BlackRock, E.D. Tex.) is pre-window, so no docket for it is in the Corpus, and courtlistener-opinions-bulk.ndjson has no opinion in it — the case’s own trail is unknown to this pass rather than negative.
Action
create
Object
ESG/DEI collusion task force at the FTC
ID
2238