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

30. Federal Trade Commission · Minor · Needs Congress

Have Congress investigate ESG practices as cover for anticompetitive activity

Partially done

873 30. Federal Trade Commission

“Congress should investigate ESG practices as a cover for anticompetitive activity and possible unfair trade practices.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The House Judiciary Committee carried its antitrust investigation of ideologically coordinated commerce into the 119th Congress and published an interim staff report, Exporting Censorship, on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media — a "responsible media" standards body the Committee describes as an advertising cartel that prepared coordinated boycott statements for its members. It is an investigation of a sustainability-branded initiative as cover for anticompetitive conduct, which is the ask; the Committee's ESG-investing strand (the subpoenas to BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and GFANZ and the Sustainability Shakedown report) is all pre-window, no in-window hearing or report squarely on ESG investing was found, and the Senate has taken nothing up. **The Committee's own letters and reports indexes were read on 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07) and they close the question the same way.** The letters index carries 222 entries for the 119th Congress and among them are **no** ESG letters at all - not one to Institutional Shareholder Services or Glass Lewis, none to an asset manager on ESG antitrust, none using the word ESG. Every ESG letter on the index is from the 117th or 118th Congress: to Ceres (2022-12-31 and 2023-05-05), to "woke companies" (2022-12-06), to asset managers on antitrust (2023-08-01), to BlackRock and Vanguard (2023-07-06), to GFANZ (2023-11-01), to 130+ Climate Action 100+ companies (2024-07-30) and to GARM members (2024-08-01). The two in-window strands that look adjacent are not this ask: eight letters of 2025-04-08 to Ivy League universities on "Potential Financial Collusion", which is tuition pricing, and three of 2026-04-28 on the Environmental Law Institute and the Climate Judiciary Project, which is climate *litigation*. The reports index tells the same story - 71 reports, of which the only in-window one on coordinated commerce is the GARM report already cited here.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Negative search: every page of judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases from the most recent (2026-08-24) back to 2024-12-13 was swept for ESG|climate|proxy|antitrust|cartel|net zero| Glass Lewis|Institutional Shareholder|BlackRock|Vanguard|State Street in the title. The only in-window hits are this report, the Sports Broadcasting Act antitrust report and a European Commission censorship report; every ESG-investing item (the 60+ NZAM letters of 2024-12-20, the 130+ Climate Action 100+ letters, the BlackRock/State Street/Vanguard/GFANZ subpoenas, the December 2024 Sustainability Shakedown report) predates 2025-01-20.
  • Trap worth recording: judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases?search=<term> is a stripped-query — ?search=ESG and ?search=climate+cartel return the same newest-first page, so a site search there “runs”, finds the wrong thing and would produce a confident false negative. Page through ?page=N instead.
  • The letters index was a moved path, not a wall (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06). judiciary.house.gov/media/letters is a real 404; the index is at judiciary.house.gov/documents/letters, and it opens to a bare curl as a single 72,831-character page carrying the 119th, 118th and 117th Congresses in three dated sections, 724 entries in all. judiciary.house.gov/documents/reports is the companion index, 71 entries. Both are complete listings with no pagination, which makes them the strongest negative available on this ask.
  • The March 2025 letters to Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis are not on the Committee’s own index. Neither name appears anywhere in the 724 entries. They may well have been sent — they were reported at the time — but they cannot be confirmed on an allowlisted page, and the right conclusion is not that they do not exist but that the Committee has not published them where it publishes its letters. They remain a lead.
  • A second stripped query, on the same host. judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/all?search_api_fulltext=<term> returns an identical 8,148-byte page for ESG, collusion and the nonsense control zzzqqxnonsense, and the hearings listing itself renders no results to an agent at all — the Congress-number filter returns 5,163 bytes of chrome. So the hearings index is genuinely not enumerable, and the in-window hearing negative rests on the press-release pagination sweep above rather than on the hearings page.
Action
other
Object
congressional investigation of ESG practices
ID
2239