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Big business has quietly swallowed a new priesthood: the chief sustainability officer. According to a recent Forbes Research survey, roughly four out of five large companies now employ a CSO, a staggeringly rapid elevation of a once-obscure title into the heart of corporate power. That shift matters because it changes who sets priorities inside companies — and too often those priorities put ideology and optics ahead of practical results.
These sustainability chiefs aren’t marginal advisors; most now sit directly under the CEO or board and claim growing influence over strategy. The same Forbes data shows executive collaboration with CSOs has more than doubled in a year, a sign that sustainability has moved from a peripheral function into core decision-making circles. When policy and investment decisions are routed through activists in suits, hardworking Americans and shareholders pay the price for unproven experiments.
What’s striking is the money behind the movement: nearly all CSOs expect bigger budgets next year, and companies are earmarking real dollars for programs that too often lack rigorous cost-benefit tests. When 93 percent of these officers forecast budget increases, Americans should ask whether those dollars will be spent to improve products and wages or to satisfy virtue-signaling scorecards. Without clear ROI, this is corporate mission creep dressed up as moral clarity.
Even Forbes admits the C-suite is increasingly treating sustainability like a top-three priority, which is a dramatic cultural pivot from just a few years ago. That elevation suggests boards and CEOs are responding more to investor and activist pressure than to market demand or consumer choice, shifting company focus toward compliance and perception management. Conservatives should be blunt: companies should protect shareholders and employees first, not chase headline-grabbing climate pledges that could undermine competitiveness.
Worse, firms are struggling to prove the returns on these investments. New reporting shows a sharp decline in the share of companies that can demonstrate sustainability ROI, raising red flags about waste, greenwashing, and faint-hearted accounting. This trend should alarm taxpayers, investors, and regulators alike — if executives cannot credibly show value, the default must be skepticism and stricter accountability.
There’s also a deeper civic danger when corporations become vehicles for social agendas: markets lose their neutral, merit-based function and policy debates migrate from legislatures to corporate boardrooms. Conservatives believe in transparency and competition, not centralized cultural engineering by multinational firms. If sustainability is to be part of business strategy, it must be measured, transparent, and voluntary — not imposed by an unelected elite within the C-suite.
Patriots who love free enterprise should push back by demanding audits, shareholder votes, and clear KPIs tied to financial outcomes and worker prosperity. Let companies pursue efficiency and innovation, including real technologies that reduce costs and improve lives, but stop the moral grandstanding that prioritizes slogans over salaries. The Forbes findings confirm a tectonic shift; it’s up to citizens, investors, and patriotic leaders to make sure that shift serves the country, not a new corporate catechism.
