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Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, I come here today--we are going to vote later this afternoon--on something else that involves overreach of the Federal Government, and I have witnessed it a lot.
I have been here just a little over 4 years. I jump in--I come from Main Street America--when it just doesn't make sense. The last time I was engaged in this was at the tail end of the COVID saga, when a rule from the Biden administration was going to force the vaccination on all Americans working, if you work for a company down to 100 employees. That is a lot of people.
We weighed in on that. It was bipartisan. The Supreme Court jumped in a week and a half or two later and, thank goodness, said enough is enough there.
Here, we are talking about something you hear the acronym, ESG-- environment, social, and governance. In a nutshell, that just means now, when we are looking at hard-earned money that you save, your retirement--let me tell you how much it is going to impact: $11.7 trillion, 152 million Americans.
I really am OK with what you want to invest in, as long as it is going to push the best rate of return. Over the long run, if something changes, that is different. But, currently, this rule now allows the criterion of using those ESG goals, which would be simplified, being able to push a certain ideology, a certain point of view, into how retirement earnings are invested.
You have got to remember, this is a fiduciary thing. Most people, when they give money to their financial adviser, their broker, you would think they would think that it is going to get the best return. Bloomberg tracked it. If you would actually invest according to ideology over the last few years, it would have been the difference between an 8.9-percent return and a 6.3-percent return.
Imagine trying to explain that in a way where someone trusted that you would be doing the best thing with their hard-earned money to get the best financial return. That is nearly a 30-percent cut in what you would have had otherwise. I have got to believe everybody would be thoroughly upset with that.
It is a step too far. It is injecting the Federal Government, and how it has enterprised over the last couple of years, into many different arenas. I think it is a wake-up call.
We are going to vote on this later this afternoon. Everyone will be able to, I think, hopefully, vote in a way that they would tell their constituents would make sense, give me the best rate of return. Figure out all this other stuff here on the legislative floor, but don't make it impact hard-earned retirement funds.
The House just last night passed this in a bipartisan way. Hopefully, we will do the same thing later this afternoon. It makes sense to Hoosiers. It makes sense to Americans.
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