Investigating Bloomberg’s climate policy AGs

In July, U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) announced an investigation into the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center (State Impact Center) at New York University (NYU) School of Law, specifically its ties to billionaire Michael Bloomberg and his philanthropic consortium, Bloomberg Philanthropies. The investigation raises important questions about the proper relationship between philanthropy and government, and where lines might be drawn concerning the former’s influence over the latter.

NYU’s State Impact Center

As part of the investigation, Rep. Comer sent two essentially identical letters to the CEO of Bloomberg Philanthropies and the executive director of NYU’s State Impact Center, requesting documents related to the program and its funding. Those letters alleged that “the Bloomberg-NYU program effectively offers states partisan money from a billionaire to carry out official functions of their offices,” and argued that such an arrangement “undermines faith in the American legal system” while raising “ethical concerns and questions about the independence of state governments.”

The State Impact Center is an environmental research and activism program housed at NYU Law. Its mission, as relevant to the investigation, is to support “the work of state attorneys general in defending, enforcing, and promoting strong laws and policies in the areas of climate, environmental justice, environmental protection, and clean energy.” The center’s work is governed by principles of “justice & equity,” and is aimed at “promoting a just transition to clean energy.”

Through the State Impact Center’s fellows program, attorneys general can apply to host a Special Assistant Attorney General (SAAG) to support their office in “clean energy, climate and environmental matters.” These SAAGs are technically employed by NYU, but their work is controlled by the state office in which they are placed, to which they owe their “sole duty of loyalty.” According to the center, fellows have been placed with attorneys general in at least 11 states (Delaware, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin), plus the District of Columbia. Each of these offices have been under Democratic Party control since at least 2019—most for considerably longer—and Rep. Comer noted that “there are no known examples of State Impact Center fellows working for Republican attorneys general offices.”

This is unsurprising in a field as politically divisive as environmental/climate policy. Indeed, the State Impact Center was established in 2017 explicitly to assist state attorneys general in their lawsuits against the first Trump administration. In an email pitching the new program to state officials, the center’s inaugural executive director David J. Hayes explained that SAAGs were available to those state attorneys general “who demonstrate a need and commitment to defending environmental values and advancing progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions.” Hayes had previously been Deputy Secretary of the Interior in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and would go on to serve as special assistant to the president for climate policy in the Biden administration.

Bloomberg and other funders

Much of the controversy surrounding the State Impact Center has focused on its funding—specifically from Bloomberg Philanthropies, which provided the initial seed money for the center. Bloomberg Philanthropies comprises all of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s giving—$21.1 billion of it, according to its website—including personal and corporate. Notably, it also includes the enormous Bloomberg Family Foundation, which in 2023 had net assets of $11.8 billion and paid out over $1 billion in grants. More than a third of the foundation’s grantmaking that year went to Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg’s undergraduate alma mater.

Bloomberg is a major funder of environmental causes, having committed $1 billion since 2019 to the Beyond Carbon campaign targeting coal and gas power plants. In 2023 alone, the Bloomberg Family Foundation reported over $130.5 million in grants to “accelerate transition to clean energy.” This included $27.2 million for the ClimateWorks Foundation, $21.5 million for the Resources Legacy Fund, $10.15 million for the United Kingdom-based Clean Air Fund, $8 million for the Energy Foundation, and $7.5 million for Earthjustice. Seven-figure grants also went to Ceres, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other environmental activist groups.

In 2017, the Bloomberg Family Foundation made a $2.8 million grant to support the State Impact Center, plus another $2.8 million approved for future payment. Subsequent grants to NYU were vaguer as to their precise purpose. From 2020–2021 the foundation gave $25 million to NYU “to support public service fellows,” while from 2021–2022 it gave the school $5 million to “accelerate transition to clean energy,” though these awards did not mention the State Impact Center. Other funders that have made grants to NYU which were specifically earmarked for the State Impact Center include the Linda and Lenny Bell Family Foundation ($250,000 in 2022) and the Mayer and Morris Kaplan Foundation ($45,000 in 2023).

Problems and pushback

Though Rep. Comer’s investigation is new, the controversy over the State Impact Center is not. A year after it was announced, then-Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Christopher Horner published an extensive report on what was happening, which was later referenced by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. The Journal wrote of what it saw as an “obvious” ethical problem: “private interests are leveraging the police powers of the state to pursue their political agenda, while a government official is letting private interests appear to influence enforcement decisions.”

Longtime Capital Research Center senior fellow and Big Philanthropy critic, the late Martin Morse Wooster, concurred: “there’s a vast difference between green groups having meetings with government officials and foundations paying attorneys general to use the power of the state to crush their enemies.” To Wooster, the Bloomberg/State Impact Center arrangement represented a “very serious breach of the wall between nonprofits and the state.”

There has been some legislative and legal pushback. In 2017, then-Virginia attorney general Mark Herring’s office applied for a SAAG, writing that “the addition of an NYU Fellow would provide a full-time attorney to allow General Herring to participate much more fully in cooperative efforts to advance the agenda represented by the State Impact Center.” While Herring initially said that he was pleased to be participating in the program, no SAAGs were ever actually placed in Virginia. In 2019, the state’s General Assembly passed a budget amendment aimed at restricting such arrangements. Wisconsin’s decision to bring on a SAAG has prompted an ongoing lawsuit from the state’s dairy farmers.

The concerns over Bloomberg-funded SAAGs boil down to questions about the influence that private ideologically-motivated donors should have over the organs of state government—in this case, through subsidizing attorneys to pursue legal actions favored by that donor. Marquette University professor Paul Nolette was quite right when he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that such an arrangement blurs the lines between public and private interests on a deeply divisive political issue.

Even if a given attorney general fully agrees with the environmental priorities of Bloomberg and the State Impact Center, and is eager to bring on a SAAG to carry out those priorities, the appearance is of private money buying its way into the legal apparatus of state government in order to advance a wealthy donor’s personal ideological objectives. At minimum, this can only serve to further decrease public trust in both philanthropy and government.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/investigating-bloombergs-climate-policy-ags/