Saving American Markets: Personnel is Policy

If personnel really is policy, as the old adage has it, then those of us who are concerned about the state of American capital markets—especially their rank politicization—can take heart. Help is on the way. Some of the brightest minds and hardest workers in the effort to save capital markets have already joined the effort at the federal level, and more are on their way. Elections matter, not least because each new presidential administration has the opportunity to refresh the federal agencies and put in place the kind of people with the knowledge and the ability to do great and important things.

This past Monday was the first day on the job for the new Senior Policy Advisor at the Department of Labor. His name is Justin Danhof, and his advisory portfolio will include such weighty topics as ESG, stakeholderism, and the interplay between political ideology and markets that has threatened Americans’ retirement savings for the last decade or more. It’s hard to imagine a person better suited for the task.

How do I know this? Well, that’s a long story, but a good chunk of it can be found in my book. You see, way back in 2021, when ESG was the dominant investment fad and guys like BlackRock’s Larry Fink were openly talking about using capital markets to “change behaviors” and save the planet from the scourge of fossil fuels, I wrote The Dictatorship of Work Capital, which The Wall Street Journal named one of its Top 5 politics books of the year and described as “an exceptionally useful presentation of the intellectual origins and present-day lunacies of woke capitalism.” I can tell you honestly that there would have been no book pushing back against ESG if it weren’t for Justin Danhof. Indeed, it’s hardly a stretch to say that there would be no pushback whatsoever against ESG if it weren’t for Danhof. I describe him as follows in my chapter on the “good guys” in the struggle:

[The Free Enterprise Project is] the conservative movement’s only shareholder activist group. And for most of the last decade, the FEP was Justin Danhof. That is to say that since 2012, Danhof has been everything to the FEP: the director, the associate director, the deputy director, the deputy associate director, the research director, the research assistant, the senior analyst, the senior writer, the administrative assistant, and the part-time shopkeeper. He has been a one-man show, in other words, with occasional support from the rest of the National Center.

In her 2017 bestseller The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech, Kimberly Strassel, a columnist and editorial board member at the Wall Street Journal, wrote, “If you’ve never been to a corporate shareholder meeting, you’ve likely never heard of Justin Danhof. If you have ever been to one, you’ll likely never forget him.” That’s both a compliment to Danhof, who is indefatigable, and a com­mentary on the state of play in the shareholder activist game. It might be an exaggeration to compare Justin to Leonidas at Thermopylae, but only because Leonidas had 299 other Spartans, while Danhof has been almost entirely on his own.

About a year later, Danhof left FEP to join Strive, the new post-ESG asset management firm founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, to serve as its Director of Corporate Governance. Now, he’s off to the Department of Labor to make sure that everyone there understands the game and its stakes as well as the rest of us do—thanks to him.

Danhof will not, however, be the only new addition at the Labor Department who will serve to reinforce the proverbial ramparts protecting American capital markets against the barbarian raiders of stakeholderism. Later this year, when the Senate confirms him, Jonathan Berry will become the Solicitor of Labor. Berry is one of this country’s most decent men and one of its most lithe legal minds. He is the former head of Labor’s regulatory office (in the first Trump administration) and is currently the managing partner at Boyden Gray, PLLC, the law firm founded by its namesake, the late White House Counsel to President George H. W. Bush. Berry is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and has spent much time writing about important and necessary reforms to the federal government’s labor laws. Over the past few years, Berry and his firm have become the leading lawyers in the country for organizations seeking legal relief against the excesses of the ESG movement, stakeholder “capitalism,” and the Biden administration’s “whole of government” approach to climate change. And that’s just the start of it. Just this past week, Politico profiled the Boyden Gray firm, noting its extraordinary influence on conservative politics and policy:

Over the past four years, the 15-person firm has emerged as one of the most visible law firms leading the charge to advance conservative policy priorities that have become a major focus of the second Trump administration. During President Joe Biden’s administration, the firm filed multiple legal challenges to corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, environmental regulations, pandemic-era vaccine mandates, and more. Now that Trump has returned to power, several current and former members of the firm have been snatched up for various roles within the administration…

“The next generation of Republican leaders are folks like Marco Rubio and JD Vance and Josh Hawley and Jim Banks and so on and so forth,” said Oren Cass, founder of the new-right think tank American Compass. “In that world, Boyden Gray really stands alone as the firm that is at the cutting edge of actually developing the legal strategy to accompany that political push and those policy priorities.”

Finally, while Danhof and Berry shore up the Labor Department, the inimitable Andy Puzder has been nominated by President Trump as the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. Like Danhof and Berry, Puzder, the former CEO of CKE Restaurants and currently the Distinguished Visiting Fellow for Business and Economic Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, is perfect for the job. As I noted in a recent review of Puzder’s new book, A Tyranny for the Good of Its Victims, he “has been involved in the fight against ESG since the very start….he has seen how the foundations of the ‘stakeholder’ ruse—which cynically pits a company’s shareholders against its employees, customers, and others—crumble in the face of simple, honest, basic information about its radical premises and practical incoherence.”

Puzder is now off to Brussels (also pending Senate confirmation), where he will confront a mob of economic illiterates who still believe firmly and passionately in the power of ESG to transform the world. More nefariously, the EU also believes that it can, through its “sustainability” regulations, control American companies, something about which the Trump administration has already expressed significant frustration. Unfortunately for the financial millenarians of Europe—but very fortunately for the rest of us—the EU is about to be challenged at a high, official level on the very premises of its 21st-century economic model. Andy Puzder will, all but certainly, make it clear that the Trump administration intends to intensify the differences between the United States and Europe on economic matters—ESG, business, and capital markets in particular.

Although headlines often suggest that the effort to defeat ESG and save American capital markets from politics is already won, I can attest that this is not so. Much work still lies ahead of us. Fortunately, for the next three-plus years, those of us enmeshed in this effort will have some very important and very proficient friends in high places. If personnel is policy, then the policy will undoubtedly be very, very good.