Public pension systems in the United States provide secure, stable retirement benefits for public servants who spend their careers serving us as teachers, firefighters, first responders, and social workers. Defined benefit pensions are the bedrock foundation of public service, as many government employees sacrifice forgo lucrative take-home pay in the private sector for stable, long-term employment and retirement security.
While pension debates appear to unfold independently across states and among the 5,000 unique public plans nationwide, many of the ideas driving them originate from national policy networks and financial industry interests that have spent decades promoting radical structural changes to public retirement systems.
A growing ecosystem of organizations presents itself as neutral, data-driven voices on retirement policy. They publish reports, testify in legislatures, and frame debates around “choice,” “flexibility,” and “modernization.” In December, we noted how TIAA framed its evolving sales strategy in response to the broader retirement “crisis.”
In many cases, the same actors are directly connected to—or aligned with—for-profit firms that stand to gain from weakening or replacing defined-benefit pensions.
Take Equable Institute, for example.
Equable produces widely circulated analyses emphasizing funding gaps, risk exposure, and the supposed advantages of alternative plan designs. Their refrain is that the sky is continually falling. These narratives shift blame onto deferred pension compensation—promises owed to public servants—alleging pensions are the culprit for tight school budgets, while elevating market-based alternatives such as charter schools.
At the same time, Equable’s leadership and governance overlap with a for-profit advisory firm — Verdara—which markets retirement plan design and strategy to non-public schools. With shared leadership and board connections, Equable and Verdara function as two sides of the same coin. That’s not just a coincidence—it’s a model.
Founded in 2018, the Equable Institute has been railing against public education and public pensions for the better part of a decade, calling the retirement security of millions of educators a “mess.” Now, after years of bad-faith attacks, they have exposed their real long-term goal: to sell alternative retirement products and profit from the attacks on teacher pensions that Equable itself propagated.
Meanwhile, BlackRock and other asset managers have increasingly discussed retirement strategies designed to provide “pension-like” income within defined contribution systems. This ties into a broader trend of asset managers and insurance firms attempting to piggyback on the shift back towards DB pensions as the retirement option of choice for employers such as IBM, and an acknowledgment that 401(k)s alone are often inadequate. They now aim to market their products as “like” defined benefit pensions, as they capitalize on a market opportunity enabled by the intentional erosion of actual DB pensions.
Asset managers and investment product vendors leverage their affiliations under broader front group umbrellas to do their bidding. Last summer, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) passed model legislation encouraging states to transition public workers to defined-contribution plans under the guise of “modernization.”
Not to be outdone, the National Council of Insurance Legislators (NCOIL) has also become a venue for the circulation of retirement policy proposals. According to a November 2025 TIAA press release, NCOIL recently called on states to review retirement systems to ensure workers have access to adequate lifetime income. After inducing demand, these firms position themselves as the sole vendor offering a new DC annuity plan, just as TIAA did in North Dakota. In other words, if their lobbying efforts are successful, these firms win a monopoly as the sole provider of DC supplemental accounts.
Reporting indicates the NCOIL statement didn’t happen on its own. TIAA itself played a central role in promoting the NCOIL resolution. TIAA EVP General Counsel, Strategy, Policy & Operations Bret Hester, made a presentation to NCOIL in April 2024 entitled “Addressing the Retirement Crisis With Lifetime Income Shift to lifetime income in defined contribution plans.” Earlier that year, two TIAA government relations executives, Josh Freely and Gerard Neely, later spoke in favor of the resolution during a November NCOIL meeting in San Antonio. TIAA is also a financial sponsor of NCOIL. In 2024, the organization listed TIAA as a ‘Speakers Roundtable’ level benefactor alongside companies such as Amazon, Uber, and UnitedHealth Group. TIAA is using its industry connections as a front to launch a stealth attack on defined benefit pensions, attempting to capitalize on benefit cuts following the global financial crisis, and swooping in to allege that pension benefits are insufficient as a maneuver to sell supplemental DC alternatives to states.
Meanwhile, the Reason Foundation’s so-called Pensions Integrity Project continues to gain traction. Affiliates in Idaho report an effort to force plans there to offer a “choice” option to join the DC plan, with Reason providing pro-pono policy assistance to legislators. Reason reports often percolate through the local media ecosystem in states, unedited, and are fed through conservative news aggregators. Same for Center Square, a project of the Franklin News Foundation and affiliated with the State Policy Network, a group of conservative and small-government think tanks that focus on state-level policy.
Bottom Line
These debates highlight a central tension in retirement policy today.
Public pension systems already provide the stable, lifetime income that financial firms increasingly promise to recreate through private investment products. All these firms are selling is a knock-off, an imitation, a copycat. The best way to stabilize public-sector retirements is to bolster their actual pension benefits. Diminishing guaranteed benefits and then pitching supplementary products is the same old privatization threat—like Alaska’s DB to DC conversion nearly two decades ago—in a different, more incremental form. Public pensions are collectively governed and designed to serve workers, whereas many proposed alternatives introduce new layers of risk, cost, and profit extraction.
At a time when pension systems are stabilizing, the pressure to restructure them is not driven by financial crisis; it is driven by greed and opportunity.
While working under the veil of “retirement security,” these vultures and profiteers, such as TIAA and Verdara, aren’t interested in securing and improving defined benefit pensions. They want to replace them outright and would make billions in the process.