Does the ‘quiet disbanding’ of SEC Enforcement’s ESG Task Force mean anything?

Here’s something I just blogged on my new “The Governance Beat” blog:

As Cooley’s Cydney Posner covers in her great PubCo blog, Bloomberg Law reported that the SEC’s Enforcement Division “quietly disbanded” its “Climate and ESG Task Force.” The task force had 22 members and lasted about three years.

Does this mean anything? Nope, not really. As Cydney notes, the SEC issued a statement that the “strategy has been effective, and the expertise developed by the task force now resides across the Division” – meaning that there is no longer a need for a task force when anyone in Enforcement can handle this type of case.

It reminds me of Enforcement’s Office of Internet Enforcement. Created in 1998, that office consisted of a handful of staffers that handled a lot of high-profile cases as online fraud first became a thing. Amazingly, it lasted a dozen years as a stand-alone office until it, too, was disbanded, as that type of special expertise wasn’t so special anymore.

So special units in Enforcement come and go – the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit is still around – but their disappearance typically doesn’t mean that much. The future of ESG enforcement cases perhaps rests more on the upcoming presidential election than on the existence of a dedicated task force, although in what way is hard to predict …