Florida Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, as well as other Republicans, are pushing back against the Biden administration’s attempt to impose radical left-wing climate-change reporting regulations on defense contractors.
In a recent letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, and Robin Carnahan, administrator of the General Services Administration, which oversees all federal property, Scott, Rubio and the others ripped the administration’s effort to impose “environmental social governance,” or ESG, rules on contractors.
Scott highlighted the letter in an email to constituents on Saturday.
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The so-called Contractor Climate Rule would force contractors and suppliers serving America’s military and space programs to disclose greenhouse gas emissions and their climate-related financial risks publicly They would also be mandated to set “science-based” emissions reduction targets.
Contractors who fail to comply with these environmental justice conditions, the senators noted, would be deemed “nonresponsible” and barred from receiving federal contracts.
The senators noted that the rule would increase federal costs by $600 million just in the first year, and in President Joe Biden’s true fashion, it violates federal law.
The lawmakers pointed out that the recent defense budget bill included language that prohibited contractors from being forced to disclose greenhouse gas emissions.
The rule, they wrote, “would be a disaster, severely distracting your agencies from critical tasks of securing our nation from foreign adversaries and of exploring our universe. Simply put, this Administration should not use procurement policy in order to meet its radical environmental justice goals.”
“When one reads the proposed ESG rule,” they continued, “it is simply astounding what is missing from the pages and pages of bureaucratic jargon: any discussion of how this regulation relates to the underlying missions of your agencies.”
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For example, the rule says nothing about how ESG compliance by contractors “supports our men and women serving in uniform, ensures readiness, or promotes a more lethal fighting force.”
“If anything,” Scott and the others say, “this rule harms recent efforts to invest in our defense industrial base.”
Ironically, a recent Pentagon report noted that environmental justice regulations “can create barriers and prevent small businesses from contracting with DOD, preventing diversification of our defense production activities and further harming our national security,” the senators noted.
“The Contractor Climate Rule would only add to the cacophony of ‘convoluted regulations’ that DOD warns about in its defense production strategy. As the United States responds to the existential threat posed by the rapid military modernization of the People’s Republic of China, this geopolitical moment calls for rapidly closing preparedness gaps—not widening them by imposing ill-considered climate justice rules.”
The proposed regulation also adversely affects contractors for NASA.
Much like the Pentagon, the agency recently released a study of its strategy to send missions to space with the Artemis campaign and found that the program’s supply-chain management did not mention “climate change” or “environmental justice” as barriers to landing on the Moon, for example.
“If this Administration determines to add regulatory costs from this Contractor Climate Rule on top of out-of-control inflation, it will only create another hurdle for NASA from exploring the Moon and Mars,” the lawmakers wrote.
“The effect of this rule is clear. It will impose hundreds of millions of dollars in new regulatory costs on our defense industrial base and our space industrial base,” they wrote. “These costs will be directly borne by the taxpayer, and the end result will be that every weapons system for DOD and every critical resource for NASA will be more expensive.”
“We have long been concerned that this Administration uses federal procurement policies to unliterally enact massive, societal changes<” the senators concluded.
“We do not intend to stand idly by as this Administration again attempts to further a radical agenda through procurement policy—this time directly harming our defense and space industrial bases.”
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