Sustainable Finance Newsletter-NYC Comptroller urges US CEOs: Do not obey Trump in advance

By Ross Kerber

Feb 12 (Reuters) - The new administration of U.S. President Donald Trump is pressing financial firms on various fronts to back away from their consideration of environmental and social matters, coverage of which I rounded up this week.

Some of my reporting turned into an interview with New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who it seems has been reading the Yale University historian Tim Snyder.

A link to the interview follows. You'll also find coverage of a new change by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seen as a blow to proponents of ESG shareholder resolutions, and how Goldman Sachs ended a diversity policy.

Please follow me on LinkedIn and/or Bluesky. Or get me via ross.kerber@thomsonreuters.com

NYC Comptroller Lander urges US CEOs: Do not obey Trump in advance

Yesterday I called up New York City Comptroller Brad Lander for his take, as an activist investor, on a move by Institutional Shareholder Services to end diversity considerations in its boardroom recommendations.

We wound up with a much wider-ranging conversation. I wrote it up for my column this week as one investor's view of how CEOs have responded to a raft of early executive orders and actions by Trump and his administration.

Click here to read the full write-up.

Company news

Goldman Sachs GS.N ended its policy to only take public companies with two diverse board members. It cited "legal developments," which reads like a nod to how Trump issued a series of executive orders to dismantle public and private DEI programs.

Executives from companies dependent on steel and aluminum imports were scrambling to offset the cost of Trump's 25% tariffs on those key metals, which Ford's F.N CEO said have added "a lot of cost and a lot of chaos" to American business.

The U.S. Justice Department, under Trump, has sharply pulled back its anti-corruption efforts, including enforcement of laws meant to stop companies from bribing foreign officials.

On my radar

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revised its guidance on when companies can skip votes on shareholder resolutions, giving new clout to executives to ignore activists pressing environmental or social issues.

A Republican-backed bill in the U.S. Congress would bar the use of a new "merchant category code" to track gun sales. Similar legislation has stalled in the past. The bill's lead sponsor, West Virginia Representative Riley Moore, said that his party's unified control in Washington will improve the bill's chances this year.

Two veteran Republican budget experts say that early efforts by Trump and billionaire Elon Musk to cut government waste appear driven more by an ideological assault on federal agencies than a good-faith effort to save taxpayer dollars, my colleagues report.