The Biden Regime* wants to make the already over-cumbersome federal acquisition regulations even more cumbersome. Since there is no statutory authority for this, I suppose eventually the holding in WV. v. EPA will catch up to it.


How many government program offices have anyone able to even evaluate this stuff in a proposal?

Don't foul up the federal supply chain with global warming nonsense

For the Biden administration, climate is everything, and everything is climate. The latest example of this single-minded obsession is a proposed amendment to the Federal Acquisition Regulation that would require “certain Federal contractors disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk and set science-based targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.”


The proposed regulation cites four executive orders as authority; no actual law is cited, demonstrating the absence of statutory authority for this effort to insert climate politics into the complex acquisition systems for major parts of the federal government. The relevant law is the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, the purpose of which “is to provide the Federal Government with an economical and efficient system” for “procuring and supplying property and nonpersonal services, and performing related functions.”


Even just the measurement of greenhouse emissions is no simple task. The estimation of “climate-related financial risk” is a hugely complex analytic exercise fraught with uncertainties and beyond the capabilities of any contractor or supplier and, for that matter, the federal government itself. Precisely how are federal contractors and suppliers to choose among the hundred-plus climate models, among the hugely complex assumptions underlying their projections, and among the conflicting “science-based” future effects of GHG reductions on a sector-by-sector basis? And about those “science-based” reductions: Reductions in greenhouse emissions by federal contractors would yield future climate effects effectively equal to zero, using the Environmental Protection Agency climate model.


And so, this effort to distort the federal supply chain would be all cost and no benefit, even under the assumptions underlying the proposal. Benefits for taxpayers from an economical and efficient procurement system? Who cares about them?


It gets much worse. The proposed rule allows international nongovernmental organizations — the Science-Based Targets Initiative, the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, and CDP Disclosure Insight Action — to define the procedural requirements for the measurement, disclosure, and estimation tasks for emissions, “risks,” and reduction targets. It is inevitable that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will force its own preferences and requirements into the federal procurement system, a precedent carrying implications enormous and enormously destructive. Amazingly, the administration is proud of this. American sovereignty? What’s that?


In its desperation to lead the international climate industry and to curry favor with the interest groups ideologically opposed to fossil fuels, the administration has shunted aside the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides that proposed rules be published in the Federal Register and that interested parties be given a meaningful opportunity to offer comments, to which the agency proposing the rule must respond. The APA says nothing about international NGOs, nor does the Constitution grant them any powers. Can anyone believe that the Biden administration cares one whit about the “consent of the governed” or that it has any sense at all about how very perverse such rules are for our system of constitutional constraints on government power?


It is no secret the Biden administration is implementing a massive climate-related regulatory onslaught. What will happen when (not if) this procurement rule conflicts with others promulgated by federal agencies? An example: the several definitional inconsistencies between this proposed rule and the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposed rule on disclosure of climate risks. What will happen when (not if) this procurement rule conflicts with the requirements defined by the very NGOs upon which the rule relies? An example: SBTi is immersed in an interminable process of defining emissions reductions for the fossil-fuel sector, and so it is unclear how those producers are to undertake compliance with the proposed Biden procurement rule, even if it were consistent with the Constitution and statutory law, which it is not.


That this proposed rule ignores science in favor of wholly political imperatives is illustrated by the fact that it exempts tribes, nonprofit organizations, universities, state and local governments, and “entities deriving at least 80% of annual revenue from federal management and operating contracts.” It is easy to predict that such exemptions will yield an artificial competitive advantage in federal contracting for those so favored, the net result of which might be future greenhouse emissions higher than otherwise would be the case. Is it “science,” or is it interest-group politics that is driving this?