Wall Street Giants Weaponize Retirement Savings for ESG Agenda
Three asset managers control proxy votes in $5.4 trillion of retirement savings, using that power to advance progressive corporate agendas without investor consent, a new report finds.
Three Wall Street firms now control the proxy votes embedded in more than $5.4 trillion of Americans' retirement savings, Bloomberg analytics show. A new report released today says those firms use the voting rights to push progressive corporate agendas that the same savers never authorized.
BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street have quietly converted ordinary Americans' retirement accounts into a vehicle for advancing political goals. The Big Three pursue racial hiring quotas and net-zero carbon mandates without investor consent.
"Three Wall Street firms have quietly become the most powerful unelected force in American corporate policy, using ordinary Americans' retirement savings to advance a political agenda those same Americans never voted for," said Aiden Buzzetti, president and founder of the Bull Moose Project, which produced the report.
The firms control 51 percent of U.S. fund assets and more than 20 percent of total U.S. stock market capitalization. Their stewardship teams remain minuscule by comparison. Vanguard employs 35 people, while BlackRock has 60-plus professionals.
Passive index funds automatically mirror the market and position themselves as "passive" investments. Their shareholder voting power, however, gets delegated to small stewardship teams that make top-down ideological decisions rather than bottom-up business analysis.
BlackRock's 2025 Stewardship Report acknowledges the firm's legal fiduciary obligation to vote in clients' best interests. The company's Voting Choice program covers only $3.76 trillion of its $7.7 trillion in index equity assets under management. The majority of clients lack voting input.
State Street's Americas head of asset stewardship Holly Fetter has championed wealth redistribution to disrupt "class oppression." She has pushed companies to consider racial diversity of boards. Fetter holds a Harvard MBA and Stanford degrees in race and ethnicity. She previously worked at the Ford Foundation and MTV Social Impact Team. State Street declined to comment on the report.
ShareAction's 2024 Voting Matters report found that only 1.4 percent of environmental and social shareholder resolutions received majority support. That figure fell from 21 percent in 2021. Vanguard ranked last among 70 asset managers with 0 percent support for ESG proposals. BlackRock ranked 67th with 4 percent. State Street ranked 63rd with 9 percent.
BlackRock's 2025 voting record shows the firm supported corporate management on approximately 88 percent of more than 154,000 proposals globally. It supported just seven of 358 environmental and social proposals.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Big Three in November 2024. He alleged the firms formed a cartel through Climate Action 100+ and the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative to artificially constrict the coal market. The suit claims the firms conspired to reduce thermal coal output by more than half by 2030, raising electricity costs for Americans. Ten other states joined the lawsuit.
"Texas will not tolerate the illegal weaponization of the financial industry in service of a destructive, politicized 'environmental' agenda," Paxton stated. "BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street formed a cartel to rig the coal market, artificially reduce the energy supply, and raise prices."
Market forces are already pushing back against ESG activism. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity's November 2025 report gave BlackRock and Vanguard A grades for voting against ESG proposals 90-plus percent of the time. State Street earned a B with 75 percent rejection. ESG fund outflows reached $19.6 billion in 2024.
Proxy advisory firms Glass Lewis and ISS have revised their guidelines away from one-size-fits-all ESG recommendations.
The Trump administration has launched regulatory crackdowns to address the structural abuse. President Trump signed Executive Order 14366 on Dec. 11, 2025. The order directed the SEC, FTC and Department of Labor to increase oversight of proxy advisors and examine whether asset managers breach fiduciary duty by following ESG and DEI recommendations.
"They are passive investors, this is how they position themselves in the marketplace and with the SEC with their filings… where they get out of line I think is where they act to try to influence management, and that's just not their role," SEC Chair Paul Atkins stated in a November 2025 Fox Business interview.
Proxy proposals on ESG topics fell 47 percent in the 2026 proxy season following SEC rule changes.
Senator Dan Sullivan's INDEX Act (S. 1670) would require passive funds owning more than 1 percent of a company to mirror the votes of active shareholders. The Bull Moose Project report endorses the "mirror voting" approach. It states the measure "prevents the Big Three's stewardship teams from acting like shadow regulators and prevents corporate governance from becoming a politicized get-out-the-vote contest."
"The Trump administration has rightly begun dismantling the woke capital regime, and Chairman Atkins's SEC has taken important first steps," Buzzetti said. "But unless Washington confronts the Big Three's stewardship teams directly, ESG will not disappear. It will simply be put on ice, waiting for the next administration."