Andrew Puzder — the fast-food executive whose 2017 Labor Secretary nomination collapsed under bipartisan revulsion — is now U.S. Ambassador to the EU, and he is using the Turnberry trade deal to demand that Brussels gut its human-rights supply-chain rules and dismantle its climate tariff. The message to the world is unmistakable: America will not clean up its own act, and now it wants to stop anyone else from cleaning up theirs.
On the second Friday of August, Andrew Puzder — the man Donald Trump once tried to install as America’s Secretary of Labor, and who withdrew after allegations about his treatment of workers and his ex-wife’s 1990 appearance on Oprah about domestic abuse — posted on X in his current capacity as the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union. His message, aimed at Brussels, was that the time had come for Europe to “deliver” on the trade deal Trump extracted at his Turnberry golf resort a year earlier. What he actually demanded was that the world’s largest democratic bloc weaken its landmark laws requiring corporations to identify and address forced labor, environmental destruction, and climate damage inside their supply chains.
Read plainly, and without the ambassadorial euphemisms, the U.S. government’s position is this: American corporations do not want to disclose whether their products are built on slave labor or the burning of rainforests, and they would like Europe to stop asking. And they would like the president of the United States to convert last summer’s tariff truce into a lever that pries those questions off the table entirely.
The two laws in Puzder’s crosshairs are the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Together they require large companies operating in the EU to fix — and disclose — the worst human-rights and environmental abuses in their global operations. In a formal statement accompanying his post, Puzder wrote that these obligations are “extraterritorial,” “costly and onerous,” and that they will “adversely impact the ability of U.S. businesses to compete on a level playing field in the EU market.”
Translated back into English: American companies would like to compete inside Europe’s market without having to answer basic questions about whether their supply chains destroy human beings or ecosystems, and they would like Europe to please lower its ethical standards to match American convenience. This is not a trade complaint. It is a demand that a foreign democracy revise its own laws to accommodate the moral appetite of the American executive class.
I. What Puzder Actually Demanded
The Framework Agreement signed at Turnberry in July 2025 contained a line, buried in the political declaration, in which the EU committed to “ensure” that its two sustainability directives would “not pose undue restrictions on transatlantic trade.” Puzder is now reading that vague sentence as an enforceable concession that Europe would rewrite the laws themselves. Brussels reads it as a political nicety.
The European Commission’s response, delivered by spokesperson Arianna Podesta, was direct. “We have been very clear and consistent,” she said, “on the fact that neither our rules framework nor our regulatory autonomy are up for negotiation.” In other words: the EU will not shred its human-rights and environmental laws because the American ambassador finds them inconvenient for ExxonMobil.
That is not hyperbole. ExxonMobil, according to Reuters reporting, was among the U.S. companies that had specifically pushed for foreign firms to be exempted from the directives entirely. Europe had already, in a December 2025 “Sustainability Omnibus,” narrowed the CSDDD to only the very largest companies, pushed the compliance deadline out to mid-2029, and lifted the CSRD threshold to firms with more than 1,000 employees. The oil majors thought that was not enough. Puzder now agrees.
“Neither our rules framework nor our regulatory autonomy are up for negotiation.”
— Arianna Podesta · Spokesperson, European Commission
II. The Turnberry Trap: A $750 Billion Fossil Fuel Bet
To understand why Puzder feels he can bark at Brussels this way, you have to understand what the Turnberry deal actually is. Struck at Trump’s Scottish resort in July 2025, the Framework Agreement imposes a permanent 15 percent U.S. tariff on most EU exports and, in exchange, commits Europe to purchase $750 billion worth of American oil, liquefied natural gas, and nuclear energy products through 2028, invest hundreds of billions more in the United States, and buy $40 billion in American AI chips.
Legal analysts at Verfassungsblog and elsewhere warned at the time that the arrangement was a trap: it handed Washington enormous permanent leverage in exchange for a temporary reduction from Trump’s threatened 30 percent tariff. Europe would now be locked, for years, into an energy dependency that Trump could weaponize at any moment. That warning is now vindicated. Puzder’s letter is the trap closing.
And it is important to see what it means that this is a fossil fuel deal. Europe did not commit to $750 billion of solar panels or wind turbines or grid batteries. It committed to buying the exact products — LNG, oil, and enriched uranium — whose extraction, transport, and combustion are cooking the planet. As Yale’s E360 documented, U.S. LNG exports are on track to double by 2028; independent research by Cornell’s Robert Howarth has found that LNG’s full lifecycle emissions can be worse than coal’s. Puzder is now demanding that the buyer of all that American gas also stop asking American companies to report on their climate impact.
$750 Billion in Fossil Fuels
The Turnberry Framework Agreement locks the EU into buying U.S. LNG, oil, and nuclear fuel through 2028, on top of $600 billion in EU investment in the U.S. by 2029.
Gut the Human Rights Rules
Puzder demands weakening the CSDDD, which requires large companies to fix “adverse human rights and environmental impacts” of their supply chains, and the CSRD, which requires them to report climate impact.
“Any Actions Necessary”
The U.S. statement accompanying Puzder’s post: “The United States will take any actions necessary to address unreasonable burdens on U.S. commerce absent a solution that addresses these concerns.”
Brussels Refuses
Commission spokesperson Arianna Podesta: cooperation continues, but “neither our rules framework nor our regulatory autonomy are up for negotiation.”
III. CBAM and the “Tariff by Any Other Name”
Puzder’s second target is Europe’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. CBAM entered its definitive phase on January 1, 2026. It applies a carbon price at Europe’s border to imports of steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizer, hydrogen, and electricity, calibrated to the emissions actually embedded in each product. Its purpose is to stop “carbon leakage” — the practice of relocating dirty production to countries with weaker climate rules so companies can dump the resulting cheap, high-carbon goods into the European market.
In an August 12 op-ed, Puzder wrote that “the EU calls CBAM a climate measure keyed to steel and aluminium content, but a tariff is a tariff even by a different name.” He described the mechanism as a “tariff in substance no matter the climate policy label,” and accused Europe of a “striking double standard” for erecting what he called “protectionist barriers” while objecting to American national-security duties.
The European Commission’s rebuttal, delivered on August 13, was factual and sharp. CBAM, Brussels said, is “non-discriminatory, WTO-compatible, and applies equally to all third countries based on verified embedded emissions, irrespective of origin.” A low-carbon American steelmaker owes little to nothing at the border. A high-carbon one owes what it would have owed had it produced inside the EU’s emissions trading system. That is not a tariff. That is a refusal to let dirty producers arbitrage climate law.
Puzder’s argument only makes sense if you believe that American producers should have the right to pollute at whatever level they like and still be treated as if they had not. That is the moral universe the Trump administration is now attempting to install as the operating logic of global trade.
IV. The Domestic Ruins: A Year of Demolishing Every Green Program at Home
What makes Puzder’s letter so grotesque is what it sits on top of. The Trump administration is not demanding that Europe relax its climate rules because the United States has found some superior path to decarbonization. The United States has abandoned the project of decarbonization entirely.
On his first day back in office — January 20, 2025 — Trump signed Executive Order 14162, “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements,” which withdrew the United States, for the second time, from the Paris Climate Agreement. NPR reported that he simultaneously declared a “national energy emergency,” revoked Biden-era climate executive orders, ordered rollbacks of restrictions on offshore drilling, opened the door to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and imposed a moratorium on new wind projects on federal lands.
The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia has since documented, in its Climate Backtracker, close to 300 federal actions rolling back climate and clean-energy policy since Trump’s return. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July 2025 gutted the investment tax credits that had made the Inflation Reduction Act the largest climate investment in American history, compressing a nine-year runway for renewable projects into a single year. Spotlight PA and Grist have chronicled the wave of canceled or paused projects that followed. The White House itself calls its own agenda “Ending the Green New Scam.”
The administration’s own Unified Regulatory Agenda, released in July 2026 and analyzed by the Sabin Center, proposes to strip protections from federal lands, remove clean-energy incentives, and roll back air and water pollution limits. Federal appeals courts have had to block the EPA from illegally clawing back green bank funds already disbursed to grantees. This is not a policy shift. It is a demolition project.
And “energy dominance” — the phrase the administration prefers — is doing a great deal of work in this story. The dominance is real, but only inside the fossil economy. The United States is now the world’s largest LNG exporter, and Trump has openly turned that position into geopolitical leverage. He has pressured Japan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, India, and Vietnam to sign long-term U.S. gas contracts as the price of tariff relief. Analysts at Reccessary have described the strategy plainly: it uses trade and security as carrots and sticks to lock in long-term fossil-fuel profitability and freeze out clean-tech competition, above all from China.
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V. Exporting Denial: Blocking Other Countries’ Climate Action
This is where the Puzder letter becomes something more than another episode of American climate embarrassment. Having burned down its own climate policy at home, the Trump administration is now using American economic weight to burn down other countries’ policies as well.
The CSDDD is the toughest supply-chain human-rights law ever written by a major economy. The CSRD is the most demanding corporate climate disclosure regime in the world. CBAM is the first serious attempt by any large jurisdiction to make polluters pay at the border. Together they represent the leading edge of what democratic capitalism looks like when it takes forced labor and planetary collapse seriously. The Trump administration is now demanding, in writing, that Europe dismantle all three.
At the same time, the U.S. is using trade access to push Asian trading partners toward long-lived American fossil-fuel infrastructure — the kind of 20- and 30-year LNG offtake commitments that lock developing economies into carbon-intensive futures they cannot afford. As one analyst told Euronews, Japan has already bought so much U.S. gas it is offloading the excess. Southeast Asia’s decarbonization runway is being paved over in real time.
“The directives’ extraterritorial reach and costly and onerous supply chain due diligence obligations will adversely impact the ability of U.S. businesses to compete on a level playing field in the EU market.”
— U.S. Government Statement · August 15, 2026
What this looks like from Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Delhi, and Jakarta is not hard to imagine. The United States, for eighty years the imperfect but indispensable underwriter of the liberal international order, is now a country that has withdrawn from the world’s only climate treaty; publicly ridiculed wind turbines; called clean-energy investment a “scam”; ordered its diplomats to lean on allied democracies to weaken their own human-rights laws; and turned trade access itself into an instrument for extracting fossil-fuel purchases. The moral authority the U.S. once claimed on human rights, on rule of law, on democratic norms — the ambassador just used it to protect the right of American corporations not to disclose the use of slave labor.
That is not “energy dominance.” That is ethical bankruptcy, executed abroad by American officials with American passports.
VI. Track Record, and What It Says About Priorities
Take the president’s climate record in aggregate and it forms an unbroken line. He withdrew from Paris twice. He killed the Clean Power Plan the first time. He gutted the IRA the second time. He has ordered the freezing of clean-energy funds. He removed the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from the Department of Energy’s org chart. He has personally mocked wind turbines as “pathetic,” and, as the Sabin Center’s Michael Gerrard has documented, has taken more federal anti-climate actions in twelve months than any president has taken in any twelve-month period in American history.
And now his ambassador is telling Europe to do the same.
The priorities on display could not be clearer. American workers, whose domestic gas bills are already rising as U.S. LNG is diverted to overseas contracts, are being asked to subsidize the export profits of the very oil and gas majors that funded the 2024 campaign. American consumers, who under the Biden-era IRA were on track to receive tax credits for home electrification, heat pumps, and EVs, have watched those credits shredded. American communities on the front lines of climate disaster — the wildfires in California, the hurricanes in the Gulf, the heat domes in the Pacific Northwest — have watched the federal government not merely retreat from mitigation but actively obstruct any state or foreign government that tries to pick up the slack.
This is not leadership. This is a president who has decided that the constituency he serves is a small, wealthy fossil-fuel lobby, and that the tools of American statecraft — including the office of an ambassador — are theirs to rent.
A Constitutional Instrument, Left Unbuilt
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, was drafted in the shadow of the Kennedy assassination to give the United States an orderly answer to a president who becomes physically or mentally unable to discharge the powers of office. Section 4 is the clause that has never been used: it empowers the Vice President and either a majority of the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to declare the president unable to serve. Congress has never established that other body.
On April 14, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland — the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a constitutional-law professor of nearly three decades — reintroduced his Commission on Presidential Capacity Act. Fifty House Democrats co-sponsored it. The bill would create a 17-member nonpartisan commission of physicians, psychiatrists, and retired officials — the standing Section 4 body the framers of the Amendment envisioned and Congress never built.
The Constitutional Argument
Raskin’s case is not that policy disagreement — even radical, destructive policy — is grounds for the 25th Amendment. He is clear about that. His argument is narrower and more serious: that the Constitution obligates Congress to have a mechanism ready for the day a president is genuinely unable to discharge the office, and that the current pattern of erratic conduct, threats against foreign civilizations, and behavior described by even sympathetic observers as unmoored, makes the absence of that mechanism a dereliction. Speaker Emerita Pelosi advanced the same argument in 2020. It is a bill about institutional readiness, not partisan removal.
Why Puzder’s Letter Is Part of the Pattern
Standing alone, an ambassador’s demand that Europe weaken its human-rights laws is not a Section 4 event. It is a scandal, and a policy disgrace, but not incapacity. The reason the letter belongs in this conversation is that it is one more datum in a pattern: a president who has withdrawn from the world’s climate treaty, ordered his EPA to illegally rescind funds already in the bank accounts of grantees, weaponized U.S. trade access to prop up a dying fossil economy, and now instructed his diplomats to press foreign democracies to abandon supply-chain protections against forced labor. When a government’s conduct in the world is so consistently at war with the interests of the people it governs and the norms of the democracies it once led, the constitutional question is not whether the president is “incapacitated” in a narrow clinical sense. It is whether the guardrails the framers built are strong enough to answer what is happening.
The Practical Barriers, Honestly
They are enormous, and any honest reader deserves to hear them. Section 4 requires the sitting Vice President to participate; Vice President Vance will not. The Cabinet Trump appointed will not. Even Raskin’s commission bill, were it to pass, would still require the Vice President’s concurrence to move forward. In a Congress with a Republican House and Senate, the bill itself will not become law. Raskin knows this. He has said so publicly to TIME. The purpose of the bill is not to remove Trump next month. It is to build the institutional infrastructure that a mature constitutional democracy should have had for the last half-century, and to force the country to name what it is watching.
Why That Does Not Negate the Case
The barriers to Section 4 do not disprove the argument that something is deeply wrong. They prove that the current constitutional architecture is inadequate to the crisis it is being asked to answer. If the only tools available for a president who abandons the Paris Agreement, deploys his ambassadors to demand foreign countries weaken their human-rights laws, and treats federal climate spending as a personal enemy are (a) an election two and a half years away and (b) an amendment that requires the participation of the very people he appointed, then the framers did not fail — we did, by never building the machinery the framers gave us permission to build. Raskin’s bill is a step. The moral and constitutional case for finally taking the step is what the last twelve months have made.
VII. What This Makes Us Look Like
There is a version of American power in which the ambassador in Brussels goes to the European Commission and asks them to move faster on decarbonization, on human rights due diligence, on the rule of law. That was, until January 2025, the version of American power the world had come to expect. That ambassador does not exist anymore. The ambassador who exists now is the one who has been dispatched to argue, on behalf of the executive branch of the United States, that the Europeans should stop making American corporations disclose whether their supply chains use forced labor.
Every foreign minister on the planet is watching this. Every democratic government that has partnered with the United States on climate, on labor, on trade, on the international rule of law is watching. So are the autocracies whose behavior these rules were written to constrain. What they are all learning is that the United States, in 2026, is not a country whose word can be treated as durable, and that the American executive is prepared to use its trade weight to attack the very norms the U.S. once wrote.
The damage is not abstract. It is the damage to every future American negotiator who walks into a room and claims to speak for a country whose commitments will outlast the next election. It is the damage to every American company that will eventually need European market access on serious terms. It is the damage to every American who believed, and had a right to believe, that this country stood for something other than the quarterly earnings of ExxonMobil.
Editorial Conclusion
A U.S. ambassador has been ordered to demand that Europe weaken its laws against forced labor and environmental destruction so that American corporations may profit more comfortably. That is not diplomacy. That is not “energy dominance.” That is the American government working, in public, on behalf of the right to pollute and the right not to answer for it. The task before Congress is not to debate whether this is normal — it is not — but to decide whether the constitutional instruments it has neglected for fifty years are finally worth building. The Constitution gave Congress the tools. What is required now is the will to use them.
Sources & References
- Reuters / Yahoo Finance — US raises pressure on EU to ‘deliver’ on non-tariff trade commitments
- Euronews — EU pushes back as US revives trade pressure on bloc
- E&E News / Politico — US threatens EU over its green reporting rules
- Epoch Times — US Tells EU ‘Now It’s Time to Deliver’ on Trade Commitments
- EU Today — Washington Tells EU to ‘Deliver’ on Sustainability Rules
- Inside U.S. Trade — U.S. envoy: EU’s carbon border mechanism a tariff ‘by a different name’
- Eurometal / S&P Global — Brussels defends CBAM after US ambassador’s protectionism claim
- European Commission — Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) — Definitive Regime
- NPR — Trump orders U.S. withdrawal from Paris Agreement, revokes Biden climate actions
- Wikipedia / Federal Register — Executive Order 14162: Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements
- The White House — “Ending the Green New Scam” FY2027 Budget Fact Sheet
- TIME — How Trump Is Trying to Undo the Inflation Reduction Act
- Grist — Biden’s climate law is dead. The energy transition might not be.
- Spotlight PA — Trump cuts to clean energy credits upend PA projects
- Columbia Climate Law — Trump Administration’s Unified Agenda Suggests Major Reversals on Climate Safeguards
- The Hill — Court halts Trump EPA attempt to rescind IRA green bank funds
- Yale E360 — It’s a ‘Golden Age’ for U.S. LNG Industry, But Climate Risks Loom
- Inside Climate News — Trump Pushes ‘Peace Pipelines’ to Boost Exports of Climate-Busting LNG
- Energy Tracker Asia — How Trump’s Tariffs Are Rewriting Asia’s Clean Energy Future
- Tulane Law — The New U.S.–E.U. Framework Agreement: Key Take-Aways for the LNG Business
- Verfassungsblog — Avoiding the Turnberry Trap: The Renewed EU–US Trade Relationship
- Global Trade Alert — One Year Since Turnberry: What Has Changed in Transatlantic Trade
- Rep. Jamie Raskin — Raskin Introduces Legislation Establishing Independent Commission on Presidential Capacity
- The Hill — Rep. Jamie Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment
- TIME — Jamie Raskin on Trump, the 25th Amendment and Impeachment
- Common Dreams — ‘We Are at a Dangerous Precipice’: Raskin Bill Would Create Commission to Examine President’s Fitness
- Reccessary — Why Trump’s push for U.S. gas could be disaster for both economy and climate
- Center for American Progress — The Trump Administration’s Retreat From Global Climate Leadership
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