BY ELIANA JONSHON SEP 21 2026 .......................................................... The Michael Bloomberg-backed climate group that pays “fellows” to work in Democrat-controlled state attorney general offices quietly closed its doors in late August amid congressional scrutiny into its funding and operations, the Free Beacon’s Thomas Catenacci reports. The Environmental Impact Center, which was housed within the New York University School of Law, did not announce the closure in a press release or social media post. But it now states on its website that the site’s content consists of “historical material as it existed on August 31, 2026.” The group’s contact email is now a private non-NYU address, and a page identifying members of the center’s advisory board has been removed. Its now-former executive and deputy directors no longer list the center as their current place of employment on LinkedIn, according to a Free Beacon review. On the one hand, the sudden closure comes as a surprise, given that the center’s 2025 “year in review” report released last December indicated it would continue operating throughout 2026. On the other hand, the closure may be a natural result of the state and federal probes the center faced over its practice of paying the salaries of state law enforcement officials who pursued lawsuits in line with policies hostile to the oil and gas industry. “Bloomberg fellows,” as they became known after Bloomberg helped found the center in 2017 with two seed grants worth $2.8 million each, worked in AG offices in D.C. and 10 states, including Minnesota, Maryland, and New York. One such fellow embedded in the D.C. attorney general’s office was behind a number of its high-profile climate-related actions, the Free Beacon reported. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee opened an investigation into the center last year, stating that its activities “raise questions as to whether participating state attorneys general are acting on independent judgement to best serve the interests of their states’ citizens.” Months later, a group of Wisconsin State Senate leaders opened their own investigation into their state’s attorney general for employing a “special attorney general” whose $ 90,000-a-year salary was paid for by the center. In a statement to the Free Beacon, the Oversight Committee’s chairman Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) said he remained concerned that the center “undermined public integrity and pushed radical Democrat policies that increase energy costs for Americans, despite billing itself as ‘nonpartisan.’” READ MORE: Bloomberg-Backed Climate Group Paying Salaries of Democratic State AG Officials Quietly Shuts Down Amid Congressional, Legal Scrutiny ------------------------ https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QLbI!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb067ff18-746e-4e72-a9ba-4878da43e583_828x622.png A church in Boston welcomes “doubters.” (Photo: Ira Stoll) A Johns Hopkins professor recently wrote in the New York Times that America “will most likely be majority non-Christian” within the next 50 years. “‘Big if true,’ as the saying goes,” the Free Beacon’s Ira Stoll writes. “A Christian decline to less than a majority would have significant and potentially profound implications on culture and politics on topics ranging from class warfare to Middle East foreign policy.” But is it true? America isn’t there yet. A 2023 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey pegged the U.S. at 64 percent Christian, and Pew Research Center polling between 2020 and 2025 found the share of U.S. adults identifying with Christianity holding “fairly stable” between 64 percent and 62 percent. But surveys in certain places and in certain younger demographics are detecting Christian minority status. A poll of 2,096 18-to-29-year-olds in the United States, the Spring 2025 Harvard Kennedy School IOP Youth Survey, found Catholic, Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian, Protestant, and LDS/Mormon respondents summing to 40 percent of respondents, with no religious preference, not sure, refused, and decline to answer adding up to 49 percent. “The theory is that if today’s youth remain as irreligious as they age and if they eventually transmit their own beliefs or lack of them to their children, U.S. Christianity will dwindle,” writes Stoll. “But so far, it’s only a theory. The Johns Hopkins professor who floated the forecast in the New York Times, Exceptional Hatred author James Loeffler, hyperlinked to a September 2022 Pew Research Center report with the subheadline, ‘If recent trends in religious switching continue, Christians could make up less than half of the U.S. population within a few decades.’ Yet subsequent Pew research found what the center describes as a five year period of ‘relative stability’ in the religious composition of the U.S. public. A 2025 Pew report was headlined, ‘Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.’” That’s not the case in Europe, where fewer than half of people in England and Wales identified themselves as Christian in the 2021 census, and where the New York Times reported recently on the planned repurposing of tens of thousands of churches “expected to become vacant in the coming years as their societies’ connection to Christianity wanes.” The U.S. differs from Europe, according to the political scientist James Q. Wilson, “because here, the lack of a government-established church forces religious institutions, free-market-style, to compete and provide value. He concluded, ‘the United States, perhaps the most modern society in the world, is filled with people who believe in God, go to church or synagogue, and pray to the almighty. The secularization theory may be in some trouble.’ In other words, thank God for the First Amendment.” READ MORE: Is U.S. Christianity Headed Toward Minority Status? ///