OPINION:

This week, President Biden issued his first veto, rebuffing HJ Res 30, the bipartisan effort to roll back a Department of Labor (DOL) rule that politicizes retirement savings.

This problematic rule allows woke money managers to use other people’s money to realize political objectives and sacrifice the financial returns of everyday investors — who are often left in the dark about these decisions — in the process. Though the administration regularly labels its political opponents as threats to American democracy, it is, in fact, the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) agenda that damages democracy by transferring power away from the American people and into the hands of Wall Street barons. 

The Left recognizes that the results of imposing woke capitalism do not have broad support from the American people. Crippling energy prices, racial quotas, weakened national security, and declining retirement savings tend to poll poorly, particularly when Americans have been suffering from decades-high inflation. Consequently, policies that lead to these outcomes do not achieve the legislative majorities necessary to pass them into law through our constitutional system.

To achieve this ideological agenda over the public’s opposition, the Biden Administration is rewriting regulations to empower its allies. Their latest effort was a DOL rule that changed the way money managers allocate the retirement savings of their clients under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, overturning protections put in place by the Trump Administration. In particular, the Trump Administration’s DOL clarified that when managing the savings of others, fund managers must “select investments and investment courses of action based solely on financial considerations relevant to the risk-adjusted economic value of a particular investment or investment course of action.”