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Last week, President Donald Trump announced his plan to offer the 54 million American workers who do not have employer-sponsored retirement plans the same retirement savings plan given to federal workers that would match workers\u2019 contributions up to $1,000 a year. The policy is just one of many on the president\u2019s new affordability agenda and has the potential to be far-reaching and deeply impactful for low-income Americans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The plan is the perhaps unlikely brainchild of National Economic Council chief Kevin Hassett and a progressive economist, The New School professor Teresa Ghilarducci.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While they may seem like an odd pairing, both Hassett and Ghilarducci share a passion for and deep concern about the future of retirement, she told Fortune<\/em>. Americans are not saving enough for a comfortable retirement, and some are returning to work because they can\u2019t afford not to.<\/p>\n A self-described \u201cretirement nerd\u201d and advocate for social democratic policies, the 68-year-old Ghilarducci told Fortune <\/em>about how she came to partner with Hassett, saying it\u2019s a natural outgrowth of her 42-year career studying retirement security. At The New School, she directs a think tank and a specialized lab that studies how to promote economic security for aging Americans and she believes now is the time for major changes in how the U.S. approaches retirement, especially for low-income workers.<\/p>\n Her work is in keeping with the New School\u2019s identity as a protest university, of sorts. It was founded in 1919 by a group of progressive intellectuals who thought Ivy League Columbia University was too conservative, as it had censored their criticism of U.S. participation in World War I. It stresses a \u201cmore relevant model of education, one in which faculty and students would be free to honestly and directly address the problems facing societies,\u201d which Ghilarducci interprets to include retirement.<\/p>\n Hassett, who has worked for both Trump administrations and has a PhD in economics, reached out to Ghilarducci in between White House stints, to ask about feedback on a paper he was writing about retirement security in 2021.\u00a0\u201cI gave him all sorts of comments, and he wrote back, and he said, \u2018You know, you should be a co-author of this paper,\u2019\u201d she said. That paper became the basis of the administration plan for universal 401(k)s, which the president announced at the State of the Union.\u00a0<\/p>\n The White House did not respond to Fortune\u2019s<\/em> requests for comment or questions about Hassett\u2019s work on retirement issues.\u00a0<\/p>\n The last 15 years has created a perfect storm for major change to come to retirement policy, Ghilarducci explained. As 76 million baby boomers have retired and Gen X\u2019s retirement is on the horizon, people have been disappointed in how their assets or 401(k)s have grown, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n A recent BlackRock survey found that people think they need about $2.1 million to retire comfortably. The average balance of 401(k) was $144,400 in Q3 of 2025, according to Fidelity Investments, or less than 7% of what people believe they need.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c[Baby boomers are] uncertain about how much money they\u2019re going to have and how long it\u2019s going to last. That\u2019s 50 million people that did not have this concern 20 years ago,\u201d Ghilarducci said, explaining that many retirees \u201chave been disappointed\u201d by how their 401(k)s and assets have appreciated.\u00a0<\/p>\n As millions retire, there has been a simultaneous increase in awareness about growing wealth inequality in the U.S., pointing to the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matters movements that focus on wealth distribution.\u00a0<\/p>\n The third and most important factor was \u201ca quirky, bold leader,\u201d she said, and the U.S. has found that in Trump. \u201cRetirement security is a worker issue, and therefore a populist politician, like Donald Trump, has reasons to take it up.\u201d<\/p>\n She said her concern for the depth of the retirement crisis has pushed her to move beyond politics.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ll work with anybody who says that workers need more security for all their life,\u201d she said. \u201cI think if I was younger, I would have these ideological, righteous concerns, but over time, the problem has just got too big for my righteous concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n Due to her expertise, Ghilarducci is often invited to events and meetings with financial managers and economists on the right, she said. She is also a trustee for two pension funds for United Auto Workers retirees at General, Ford, and Chrysler, and steelworkers at Goodyear.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m very comfortable there,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m usually there to give another point of view.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n While it comes to retirement security, she said Hassett is just as \u201cpassionate\u201d as she is, describing him as an \u201cempathetic, emotional guy.\u201d She said they bonded over being \u201cPhD nerds\u201d and their mutual commitment to making retirement better for more Americans.\u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s this empathy we have for old people, because we\u2019re human and we\u2019re going to get old.\u201d<\/p>\n Specific details of the president\u2019s plan for universal 401(k)s and how workers can enroll have not yet been released. Economists have estimated that a plan like Trump\u2019s would help the poorest 25% of Americans save between $138,000 and $610,000 for their retirement.<\/p>\n \u201cThis plan has been thoroughly studied by hundreds of experts and professors for many years, and this is surely an idea whose time has come,\u201d Ghilarducci said. \u201cIt should have happened earlier, before half of baby boomers retired. It would have really helped them.\u201d<\/p>\n She said she believes that low-income workers need a bigger match than $1,000 each year and she hopes Congress will pass a more generous match for workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis is an architecture, a design, where they have the best chance of putting some money in their accounts early in their life, keep it there and then,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen you do that, you take advantage of the magic of math, because compound interest kind of takes over for the workers\u2019 contribution.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #retirement #nerd #uberliberal #School #teamed #Trumps #economy #guru #reinvent #401k<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week, President Donald Tr… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[14379,299,486,617,15118,15115,2990,208,109,3303,4754,15117,496,15116],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26594"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Right place, right time<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Mutual concern, mutual commitment<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Details are yet to be released<\/strong><\/h2>\n