Bloomberg reports:
A draft executive order targeting a requirement that companies trace their use of minerals from war-torn regions in Africa is the latest sign that Republicans are wasting no time rolling back the Dodd-Frank Act's corporate disclosure provisions. ...
Dodd-Frank authorizes the SEC to revise or temporarily waive the requirements of the rule for up to two years if the president determines it is in the national security interests of the U.S. The commission declined to comment.
Back in 2015, Foreign Policy reported that:
At the beginning of September, 70 academics, researchers, journalists, and advocates published a blistering open letter criticizing Dodd-Frank and its backers, asserting that the groups and activists pushing to stop the trade of conflict minerals risk “contributing to, rather than alleviating, the very conflicts they set out to address.” Their campaign “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between minerals and conflict” in Congo, the signatories said. (Some critics have gone further still, charging that the advocates who sculpted and pushed Dodd-Frank have even misrepresented, in the name of what they see as a greater good, the situation on the ground in Congo.) Two months later, on Nov. 30, the Washington Post published a long investigative feature describing how Dodd-Frank “set off a chain of events that has propelled millions of miners and their families deeper into poverty.”
Earlier this year, Capital & Main reported that:
But the law’s opponents include progressive journalists and academics who say the rule rests on an overly simplistic analysis of a complex crisis. Some say it has done more harm than good to Eastern Congolese mining communities, whose livelihoods are already precarious.
The law has deprived “very vulnerable populations, already very poor people, of their sole means of livelihood,” says Séverine Autesserre, a political science professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, and a former humanitarian aid worker who studies the DRC. “The legislation has actually made the situation worse for these people.”
So I'm inclined to support a rollback.
For prior commentary see:
