Nevin's Data "Points"

Twenty years ago, I authored [i] a cover story about the then-newly enacted Pension Protection Act of 2006 with an ambitious headline: “The Pension Protection Act: This Changes Everything.”   Twenty years later, it seems like a reasonable time to ask: Did It? The short answer, I think, is yes — though probably not quite in the ways we expected in 2006. The PPA was a sweeping piece of bipartisan legislation, addressing among other things defined benefit funding, pension accounting, and cash balance plans — it was titled the PENSION Protection Act, after all.  And it was, for the benefits promised by those plans, an important defensive measure. [ii]    However, to my eyes then — and now — the most lasting influence of the PPA was on the defined contribution side, where it helped change not just plan design, but the industry's thinking about participant behavior. To Appreciate 2006, Go Back to 1986 Twenty years earlier, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 had significantly tigh...

   I recently did a roundup of some of the most significant retirement-related events of 2025. Then Jack VanDerhei, PhD fed that column through ChatGPT applying the style that famed humorist Dave Barry takes with HIS annual Year-in-Review. The result follows... Enjoy! The Year in Retirement Plans: 2025 By someone who survived it and would like credit By almost any measure, 2025 was a remarkable year for retirement plans, largely because it managed to be historically consequential without passing a single massive, system-rewriting law. This is unusual in the same way it is unusual when your roof collapses even though no meteor hit it. There was no SECURE Act sequel. No Pension Protection Act reboot. Congress flirted with something called the One Big Beautiful Bill , then decided retirement plans should sit this one out, possibly because they were tired. Instead, 2025 delivered something far more subtle and far more exhausting: implementation problems, interpretive confu...