Following our sharp criticism of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday of the agency’s increasing restrictions upon smaller shareholders, Politico reported about the dissatisfaction by proponents across the political spectrum.
NLPC’s latest grievance has to do with suddenly being banned from the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) system. The new access denial has to do with no longer allowing smaller shareholders (like NLPC) in public companies to submit reports to EDGAR, where they could previously advocate their positions on voting items under consideration for upcoming annual meetings. Many investors who vote on these items monitor EDGAR regularly for companies they have an interest in.
The reports filed by NLPC and others are called “exempt solicitations,” which are legally required of investors who hold more than $5 million of stock in a company, but not those with less than that amount. The SEC announced on Friday that, because the small-timers were filing too many of the solicitations, that they would no longer be allowed to do so. From Politico:
Agency leaders have “decided that if you don’t have $5 million in stock, you don’t have the right to speak on the SEC’s digital public square,” wrote the National Legal and Policy Center in a lengthy statement, which the conservative foundation published on Tuesday. “They are treating the EDGAR system — a public resource — like an elite country club where the dues are $5 million and the only topic allowed for discussion is how great corporate management is doing.”
The article described NLPC as “one of the nation’s most prolific filers of shareholder proposals, many of which seek to roll back corporate climate initiatives.” Politico also noted how the unusual situation has aligned left-leaning shareholder activists like As You Sow with NLPC, regarding the wrongheadedness of the SEC’s new restrictive policy.
Besides sponsoring proposals, NLPC is also one of the top producers of the exempt solicitations that the SEC has now banned, as corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell reported earlier this week:
As discussed in our 2025 Proxy Season Review, there were 220 notices of exempt solicitation submitted to the Commission in the first half of 2025. A substantial majority were voluntary submissions, and just five frequent shareholder proponents (As You Sow, John Chevedden, Green Century, National Legal and Policy Center and Bowyer Research) accounted for 113 of these filings.
NLPC circulated 24 of the solicitation reports to investors in 2024, and 28 of them in 2025, all of which were also filed in the SEC’s EDGAR system.
NLPC’s past and present shareholder proposals, transcripts of presentations at annual meetings, exempt solicitations (or “proxy memos”) and links to media coverage of our activities, can be found on our Corporate Tracker page.
