State Financial Officers Trusted to Protect Americans’ Money

The American public is skeptical of elected officials. Frankly, I don’t blame them. However, state financial officers — including treasurers, auditors, and comptrollers, who have the responsibility to serve as checks and balances on every tax dollar being processed through their offices — enjoy a uniquely high level of support, as confirmed by a new poll. There are good reasons for that.

The State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) – an organization founded on the belief that strong financial stewardship means playing a larger role in promoting fiscally responsible, free-market, pro-growth policies – supports state financial officers who share those same views. Our 40 state financial officers – who represent over 170 million Americans – have been fighting hard to protect taxpayer dollars from being used irresponsibly. They have supported pulling investments from companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and pushed back against various goals of the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement.

ESG forces organizations and companies to make business decisions based on a leftist ideological perspective on climate change and social issues, while altering corporate governance polices to comply with that ideological approach. Those ideologically stained business decisions often negatively impact the organization or company. They can also reduce the value of a hard-earned pension for a public school teacher or police officer because of a state pension fund invested in an ESG-focused company that lost value because of those policies. ESG policies increase the cost of gas, contribute to inflation, and create a lower quality of life for Americans. This is the wrong approach, as businesses should focus on delivering high-quality goods and services for their customers, not political victories for left-leaning ideologues.

Americans of all stripes agree. In a new national survey conducted by TargetPoint, a majority (56%) of American registered voters agree that “ESG is a highly subjective, politically charged idea that is forcing progressive policies on everyday Americans resulting in higher prices for nearly everything.” (Just 27% surveyed disagree with that statement.) It is mainstream sentiment that retirement security should not be jeopardized to enable activist-driven corporate virtue signaling. And doing so isn’t just unpopular, it’s illegal. Elevating ESG’s leftist political goals to the same level as financial interests is a violation of ERISA and securities laws.

Our state financial officers knew this instinctively. They were the first public officials to sound the alarm about ESG’s true nature.

It makes sense then, according to the same poll, that voters place more trust in state financial officers than other elected officials to provide responsible fiscal management, oversee state investments, and prevent out-of-control spending. State financial officers are more trusted on financial issues than governors, attorneys general, state legislators, and even members of Congress. When asked who they trust most to make the right decisions on fiscal and financial matters, 47% of those surveyed said state financial officers, 31% said governors, and 22% responded with congressional representatives. It is noteworthy that state financial officers are more than twice as trusted as Congress.

A broad consensus – 88% of voters surveyed – agree that “Government should be focused on protecting individual rights so that people can pursue prosperity and solve problems freely.” Over the past several years, too many Americans had their individual rights abridged by financial institutions that closed their financial account as a response to their political or religious views – a practice known as “debanking” – often without notice or explanation.

Our state financial officials are leading this fight, too, as they work to address politicized debanking with financial institutions directly. They have also encouraged Congress to investigate debanking and the potential that federal agencies placed pressure on banks to quietly enact discriminatory policies that would never receive congressional approval or be supported by voters. Americans’ freedom to bank should never be subjected to a litmus test of their political or religious beliefs.

This survey shows that most Americans are rooting for what our financial officers are doing to defend their financial security. They see state financial officers protecting their hard-earned tax dollars from being weaponized against them and their families, or going to fund adversarial countries, political ideologies, or discriminatory banking practices. It is no wonder they have earned the public’s trust—and no doubt they will fight to keep it.