The SEC killed Biden's climate regulation mandate in May – and the accounting firms that profited from it went silent.
Now 16 state attorneys general want to know exactly how much money those firms made before the mandate died.
What they found was a conflict of interest so obvious the firms apparently assumed nobody would ever add it up.
What ESG Climate Disclosures Are and Why They Raise Grocery Prices
Climate disclosures are not audits of a company's products or finances.
They are government-mandated reports forcing businesses to track, measure, and publish their greenhouse gas emissions – and then pay to have those measurements verified by an outside accounting firm.
That outside accounting firm gets paid twice – first to audit the company's regular financial statements, then again to sell a separate "sustainability consulting" package to help comply with the exact climate rules the firm helped push in the first place.
Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers, who co-led the 16-state coalition suing to stop them, put it directly: the Big Four's climate commitments "force clients to make burdensome climate-related disclosures that drive up the costs of their services and place onerous requirements on farmers and small businesses."
Those costs go somewhere.
"These costs will ultimately be passed onto consumers, who will be forced to bear the burden of increased prices for food, energy, and other everyday products," Hilgers said.
A Nebraska grain farmer who sells to a food company now faces pressure to track and report his carbon emissions – because the accounting firm auditing that food company made a U.N. net-zero promise and needs the supply chain data to keep it.
How Deloitte KPMG Ernst Young and PwC Used Net Zero Pledges to Profit From Climate Rules
Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers – the four firms under investigation – together audit roughly 80 percent of all public companies in America.
All four were members of the U.N.-sponsored Net Zero Financial Service Providers Alliance, where members pledged to align their services with the Paris Climate Agreement's net-zero goals.
That is not a neutral professional commitment.
That is an ideological promise, made to a foreign organization, that directly shapes how these firms advise American businesses.
The 38-page AG letter states the firms "appear to have violated their professional duty of independence by committing to push for climate-related disclosures in financial reporting, contrary to professional standards of materiality, neutrality, and error avoidance."
By January of this year, the NZFSPA announced it was "reorganizing," with member companies now pursuing activities independently.
That exit did not happen because the firms had a change of heart.
It happened because Republican attorneys general, state treasurers, and conservative lawmakers began warning that membership in these climate alliances constituted antitrust violations – coordinated collusion to impose costs on American business.
The same pressure campaign already collapsed the Net-Zero Banking Alliance entirely, driving out JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley.
The ESG Conflict of Interest Attorneys General Are Demanding Answers On
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, who opposed the Biden climate disclosure mandate from the start, described climate disclosures as "high-priced guesses about the present and the future."
The AGs' letter zeroes in on a specific and damaging conflict: the Big Four not only audit companies' climate disclosures, they sell those same companies the ESG consulting services needed to produce them.
The firms that are supposed to be independent arbiters of financial truth are profiting on both ends of a mandate they helped create.
"It's outrageous that these massive firms continue to push climate activism while claiming to be independent and objective," said Will Hild, executive director of Consumers' Research. "By embracing ESG and net-zero agendas, they put ideology ahead of shareholders while profiting from the costly requirements they help impose on customers."
The AG letter demands five years of revenue figures from climate disclosure assurance, sustainability reporting, and ESG consulting services.
None of the four firms responded to press inquiries by publication time.
Trump Killed the Federal Climate Disclosure Mandate But Two Back Doors Are Still Open
The Trump administration moved quickly.
In March 2025, the SEC announced it would not defend Biden's climate disclosure rule in court – the one that had mandated publicly traded companies audit and disclose greenhouse gas emissions across their entire operations.
By May of this year, the SEC formally rescinded the mandate entirely.
Trump also withdrew the United States from more than 60 U.N. climate-affiliated organizations in January, declaring them contrary to American national interests, security, economic prosperity, and sovereignty.
But the climate disclosure machine is still running through two back doors the federal government cannot directly close.
Europe's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires disclosure from any company that does business or lists there – affecting an estimated 50,000 companies worldwide.
California's greenhouse gas reporting law hits any company with annual revenues of $1 billion or more that operates in the state.
The Big Four operate and profit extensively in both Europe and California – which means they can keep pushing climate disclosure requirements on American companies regardless of what Trump does federally.
That is the scheme 16 state attorneys general just exposed.
Sources:
- Kevin Stocklin, "State AGs Target 'Big Four' Accounting Firms, Claim They're Pushing Climate Disclosures," The Epoch Times, August 27, 2026.
- Tate Rosentreter, "16 State AGs Call Out Big Four Accounting Firms for Prioritizing Climate Goals, ESG," The Center Square, August 25, 2026.
- "EXCLUSIVE: Big Four Accounting Firms Under Fire Over Climate Commitments," The Daily Caller, August 24, 2026.
