Anti-ESG Legislation Tracker
2021-2024 state legislative trends and analysis
Pleiades maintains a live public tracker of anti-ESG bills (2021-2024) as a tool for investors, policymakers, journalists, and academics seeking to understand the evolving contours of the anti-ESG legislative campaign in US states. Additional context and analysis can be found in our Summer 2023 Statehouse Report and 2024 State Legislative Outlook.
Please contact us for assistance navigating the tracker, custom statistics, and additional analysis.
Since 2021 Republican lawmakers have introduced state legislation to weaponize government funds, contracts, and pensions to prevent companies and investors from considering commonplace risk factors in making responsible, risk-adjusted investment decisions. This coordinated legislative campaign — alongside the parallel efforts of Republican state executives, members of Congress, and presidential candidates — is commonly referred to as the anti-ESG movement. Anti-ESG efforts are largely viewed as a reaction to the progress made the past decade as corporations, encouraged by their investors, customers, and employees, worked to better understand, disclose, and manage environmental, social and governance risks.
Anti-ESG policies are designed to drive publicly managed funds to preferred higher-risk industries, such as fossil fuel companies and gun manufacturers, and to curtail corporate engagement with business-relevant topics like climate change, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), worker’s rights, and governance.
What is Anti-ESG?
High Costs
drive opposition to anti-ESG efforts
In red, blue and purple states alike, Anti-ESG policies have generated massive backlash from the business community, labor leaders, retirees, libertarians, environmentalists, and even some Republican politicians.
Much of the opposition honed in on the high costs of these harmful policies — with billions of dollars in potential lost pension returns and higher municipal financing costs.
These bills have faced significant opposition from across sectors, and the bills that became law were often heavily revised to weaken core provisions and minimize costs. Despite the amended provisions, the consequences of these laws have been harmful and costly to retirees, local governments, and working people.
For more information on costs, please see our 2023 report.
The Anti-ESG effort has been driven by a constellation of right-wing organizations with ties to fossil fuel industry and anti-worker interests. These organizations have circulated 9+ model bills that target ESG or seek to weaponize state finances in support of preferred industries, like fossil fuels and gun manufacturing. The majority of the bills we have tracked contain provisions from these models, including those that target contracting authority, pension management restrictions, forced securities disclosures, liability shifts, and opposition to federal rule-making. More information on the organizations behind this campaign can be found here.
The Coordinated Right-wing Network Behind Anti-ESG Attacks
Pleiades has tracked anti-ESG bills closely since 2022, and we have built a comprehensive list of bills that target ESG investing or seek to weaponize state financial action to support preferred industries, such as fossil fuels and gun manufacturers. This includes bills that target government funds, contracts, public worker pensions, and securities regulatory authority to prevent companies and investors from considering commonplace risk factors in making responsible, risk-adjusted investment decisions. This tracker strictly monitors state-level bills. State executive rules and Congressional legislation are not currently included.
We have limited our focus to anti-ESG bills filed from 2021 to the present.
There are closely-aligned legislative strategies that pre-date the culture war attack on “ESG,” some of which we track, and some of which we rely on other organizations for their own tracking efforts. Thanks to these efforts, we are able to offer combined statistics across multiple trackers for anyone who is interested.
Our tracker now includes anti-ESG bills that are narrowly focused on enriching the firearms and ammunition industries, which our previous June 2023 report did not include. This trend predates the anti-ESG trend, as model “nondiscrimination” bills forcing state governments to favor weapons manufacturers have circulated since at least 2015. We recommend contacting Everytown for Gun Safety and the Giffords Law Center for more information on this trend.
Several efforts exist to track anti-DEI legislation. Our tracker includes a subset of these bills, when they are focused on leveraging government investments, spending, or mandates to coerce the private sector into maintaining practices of institutional racism. We are monitoring the overlap between our own tracker and the dedicated anti-DEI trackers published by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the Education Trust, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), Just Vision and Palestine Legal track legislation that undermines backlash to boycotts and divestment campaigns to hold Israel accountable for its occupation of Palestinian territories. We recommend contacting FMEP and Just Vision for more information on this trend.
This tracker does not include bills requiring divestment from companies with interests in China, Russia, Iran, South Sudan, or other countries, unless there are also anti-ESG provisions included.
Lists of state-specific bills are embedded on pages contained within SFOFexposed.org by the Center for Media and Democracy.