Welcome to the latest edition of This Week in Pensions! We have gathered the top stories about pensions and retirement security from the previous week.
2025 NPPC Year in Review
It’s been a busy year in the public pension world, with workers in Alaska moving closer to restoring their defined benefit pension, overall public pension funding at record highs, and union members in Ohio coming together to form the Ohio Public Pension Coalition.
As 2025 comes to a close, it’s time to reflect on some of the most-read pension stories of the year. Together, these stories reached more than 2 million people across 136 media outlets, reflecting a growing national demand for stability, fairness, and long-term security.
Published on February 13, this story, A possible shift seen in America’s troubled retirement savings landscape, reached more than 1,041,863 people across 98 outlets, making it the most widely shared pension story of the year.
Read our latest blog for the complete countdown of top-read stories.
Equable Institute’s Bad Faith Report
This week, the anti-pension Equable Institute released a new analysis claiming that “Only 46.6% of public workers are being served well by their retirement plans.” Equable, which is an extension of the right-wing libertarian Reason Foundation, claims to advocate for “retirement security of all public servants.” Before joining Equable, Executive Director Anthony Randazzo served as director of the Reason Pension Integrity Project and as director of economic research at the Reason Foundation. Last year, Equable received $360,000 from Reason.
Equable does get part of their analysis right, noting that the overall value of public defined benefit pensions has decreased by over $140,000 since 2006, due to austerity-driven changes made following the global financial crisis. What they fail to acknowledge is that these pension benefit cuts were done hand in hand with workers themselves, with unions often agreeing to the changes to support the long-term solvency of the funds. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College indicates that following the Great Recession, 74% of state plans and 57% of large local plans cut benefits or made other reforms.
It is disingenuous of the Equable Institute to highlight the reduced value of public pensions today without acknowledging the role its siblings at the Reason Foundation played in cheerleading these benefit reductions. Just this year, Reason called the drastic benefit cuts in Oklahoma a “model of success.”
So if Equable and Reason want to trumpet past pension benefit cuts and state that current benefit levels are insufficient, yet they oppose increases to pension benefits, what exactly are they trying to accomplish?
A hint to the answer to that question was foreshadowed in August, when Reason and Equable’s allies at the far-right, billionaire-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) finalized a model policy framework “for state and local government to create or improve defined contribution retirement systems for public employees.”
The draft language from ALEC says, “The board shall: Enter into a contract with a company or companies to provide and administer retirement plan investments, retirement lifetime income products, and in-plan annuity products…”
Together, public pension opponents are setting the table for a new attack on public pensions that first highlights the benefit cuts they pushed for without irony and then presents the solution as lifetime annuity products. One can only assume this advocacy is being funded by the firms that would profit from selling these annuities to public employees.
Last month, TIAA rolled out The Common Thread—a white paper that subtly downplays the effectiveness of traditional defined-benefit (DB) pensions and promotes “lifetime income” products as the alternative. Thus, it appears ALEC, Reason, Equable, and TIAA share the same mission: to sell more DC products to captive audiences of public employees, while denigrating public defined benefit pension plans in the process.
Read more about TIAA’s campaign against defined benefit pensions, click here. Be sure to check back next Friday for the latest in the fight for a secure retirement! For now, sign up for NPPC News Clips to receive daily pension news from across the country directly to your inbox.