FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Dorothy Slater, [email protected]
Revolving Door Project Reacts to Treasury’s New Climate Data and Analytics Hub Announcement
In response to reports that the U.S. Department of the Treasury will create a “Climate Data and Analytics Hub” within the Office of Financial Research, Revolving Door Project Senior Researcher Dorothy Slater released the following statement:
“The creation of a Climate Data and Analytics Hub is excellent, if long overdue. It is absolutely critical that financial regulators have the data and research tools they need to fully assess the threat climate change poses to American financial stability and respond to it.”
“However, a climate hub will be meaningless if it doesn’t have proper staff and resources to function. We have previously written about the decimation of the Office of Financial Research (OFR) since its inception. Between 2016 and 2021, OFR’s budget was arbitrarily slashed by 25%. Its staffing suffered an even worse fate, with the office’s full-time equivalents dropping by 40% over the same period. Devastating budget cuts coupled with a drastic staffing shortage led to a 73% decrease in publications from 2016 to 2021.”
“OFR is a crucial tool for financial regulators, but it needs to staff up in a serious way if the climate hub has any chance of fulfilling its potential utility. To merely create a new office is not enough. Biden must ensure that OFR – and any new climate offices housed within it – are actually empowered with the resources necessary to fully honor and implement their mandate. To do so, the Biden administration must appoint a new OFR Director, restore the office’s funding to at least pre-Trump levels, and prioritize a quick re-staffing of this critical office.”
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