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Paxton Sends Message to Overzealous Federal Regulators
Threatening Texas’s Banking and Energy Industries
AUSTIN – Attorney General Paxton signed a Utah-led letter to Acting Comptroller Hsu of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) regarding the appointment of a Chief Climate Risk Officer, as well as the OCC’s misguided focus on “climate-related financial risk.”
These moves paint a deeply problematic picture. Punishing certain energy-producing industries that don’t meet the Administration’s progressive political goals unlawfully transforms the OCC from a financial regulator into an ideologically-motivated environmental regulator.
This trend, combined with other actions that the Biden Administration has taken to target American energy, will only deepen the painful inflation now harming American families. It also creates the potential for a full-blown energy crisis like the one that Europe currently faces.
As with other instances of federal overreach, the OCC’s actions will not go unchallenged. The letter highlights the many ways that Attorney General Paxton and other attorneys general will fight back in their own states. This includes communicating with state-level financial institutions to ensure that federal regulators do not abuse their authority to punish certain industries.
“Any regulatory efforts that exceed your agency’s statutory authority, that reduce the resilience of our financial institutions by restricting the entities they can do business with, or that misallocate risks to fit a political agenda harm our state, our communities, and our consumers,” the letter reads. “Such actions are unlawful, and our states can rightly challenge them.”
To read the full letter, click here.
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