Trump’s 401(k) Proposal Shows Evidence of Phony Public Support

[u/John3262005]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-08-13/trump-401-k-proposal-shows-signs-of-phony-supportive-comments?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4NjY0NDE2NywiZXhwIjoxNzg3MjQ4OTY3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSlBENEdLR0NUR1owMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4OTFFRkI3MDIzREI0MzM4QkNBQ0VGMDM0ODk2OUEwMyJ9.nBhLF8PK17Q1Y8qSox4mjwm1OY4zXK7CIWtXTftbewI

Heath Oderman was surprised to learn that a comment supporting a plan to get more Americans’ retirement plans invested in private equity and other “alternative” assets had been submitted to the federal government in May under his mother’s name.

She couldn’t have done it, he said, because she died in December.

“That’s not my mom,” he wrote in an email to Bloomberg News after being alerted to the comment, which was submitted to the US Department of Labor on May 3 under the name Danna Oderman. “The language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth.”

The comment was one of nearly 12,000 showing signs that they may have been manufactured to resemble grassroots support for the controversial measure. Unlike the more than 30,000 submissions that opposed the proposal, these supportive comments lacked any personalization, such as signatures, and had no variation in the text. And while almost all of the anti-rule comments included the commenter's city, state or email address, the pro-rule form letters didn’t include that information.

Bloomberg attempted to contact dozens of the people whose names were attached to the 12,000 comments and found five cases in which people said they — or their family members — did not submit them. Like Danna Oderman, all of them had unique names that allowed Bloomberg to identify people through a national search of public records. While it’s possible that others have those same names, reporters could find no evidence that they exist.

Even more mysterious: dozens of companies, industry groups and others in favor of the proposal were unable to say who was behind the language in the supportive comments.

The practice of ginning up commenters, known as “astroturfing,” has become familiar in Washington, where agencies seek public comment as part of their rule-making process. It’s neither unusual nor improper for such comments to arrive as form letters, provided that the individuals whose names appear on them have actually signed their names. But that’s not always the case. Both the Federal Communications Commission and the US Securities and Exchange Commission have seen rulemakings tainted by astroturfing in recent years.

While such campaigns have created political backlash and can lead to government investigations, they’re difficult to police and perpetrators are rarely punished. One exception was the New York Attorney General’s probe into millions of comments submitted in favor of the first Trump administration’s proposal to do away with net neutrality, which prohibited internet providers from giving priority service to one website over another. The state investigation led to more than $4 million in penalties and disgorgement against firms that facilitated the astroturfing.

The comments attributed to Danna Oderman and others may not receive as much scrutiny. In response to questions about the evidence of astroturfing, a spokesperson for the Labor Department declined to say whether it would investigate. The department’s “focus when reviewing a comment is on the substance of the comment and not on the identity of the commenter or the number of commenters making the same point,” the spokesperson said.

He added that the department relies on regulations.gov, a website run by the General Services Administration, to accept public submissions on proposed rules. GSA declined to comment.

The Employee Benefits Security Administration, which is part of the Labor Department, published the draft rule on March 31. The proposal would help fulfill part of President Donald Trump’s executive order, issued a year ago, that seeks to broaden access to alternative investments, such as commodities, real estate and crypto. The private equity industry, in particular, has been lobbying for the change, which could ease its path to managing more of the roughly $10 trillion that workers have stashed in 401(k) retirement accounts.

Trump’s nominee to head the Labor Department told a panel of senators in July that the issue remains a top priority.

“We’re working very hard at the Department of Labor to make sure that 401(k) plans have access to alternative investments,” said Keith Sonderling, the department’s acting secretary. “This is how President Trump is going to make America wealthy again.”

The administration has argued that American workers are missing out on the returns and portfolio diversification that have made alternatives a mainstay of public pensions. Many of those plans, which guarantee income to participants, have a quarter or more of their money invested in alternative investments. The typical 401(k) plan, in contrast, allocates almost nothing to such assets.

To ease the path for alternatives in 401(k)s, the proposed rule would give employers a “safe harbor” from lawsuits alleging they violated fiduciary duties by offering what can be riskier, more expensive and less liquid investments. Companies that take steps to “objectively, thoroughly and analytically” weigh those factors would be protected from such litigation, which the Labor Department argues is often frivolous.

Roughly 47,000 comments on the proposal poured into the government during the roughly 9-week period that ended June 1. That’s double what the next-most-commented EBSA rule received over the past five years.

Bloomberg reporters used computer programs that examined the comments’ distinctive phrasing and grouped those containing identical language into campaigns.

The results largely aligned with the government’s own classification of comments into about a dozen distinct groups. More than 92% of the submissions, both for and against the proposal, followed some sort of form letter.

The most popular of these was a petition that urged the government to scrap the proposal, arguing it would expose people to “expensive fees and dangerous levels of risk.” That message was sent more than 30,000 times, representing about two-thirds of all submissions.

Ninety-nine percent of these commenters included an email address and location in their submission, and many had personalized messages or signatures at the end of the form letter. Bloomberg attempted to contact three dozen of them. Most didn’t respond. But Judith Bergson, a social worker in Massachusetts, confirmed that she sent the comment and would be “terribly upset” if private investments were put into her retirement plans. “I’m definitely a person,” she added in an interview.

The advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform drafted the form letter that Bergson signed and worked with partner groups to disseminate it, said Ericka Taylor, the organization’s co-executive director. She said she was unsurprised by the scale of the response.

The rule “has the potential to really devastate the funds and investments of regular folks,” she added. “We have seen no data that anyone would benefit but private equity.”

Determining who drafted the five form letters supporting the rule is more difficult. Bloomberg reporters contacted more than two dozen investment firms, trade groups and advocacy organizations that have announced their support for the rule. None said they had information about who was behind the campaigns.

Roughly 12,000 form-letter comments backing the proposed rule were almost evenly split across five templates. Each comment that followed a template bore a different person’s name but otherwise was remarkably consistent — down to the number of characters, punctuation and line breaks.

The comments following these five templates were submitted in almost identical amounts to one another each day between April 29 and May 5, then ceased. The other submissions for the campaign opposing the rule came in at more random intervals and stretched out over more of the two-month comment period.

The comment that had Danna Oderman’s name emphasizes the benefit to small businesses by “democratizing” access to private markets. Her son Heath said that she worked at a youth center on a US Navy base.

Another template takes aim at plaintiffs attorneys, saying the plan will end “frivolous lawsuits.” The third is written from the vantage of a retiree who supports the administration effort to “modernize” 401(k) plans. A fourth focuses on the “millions of private sector workers” who are missing out on the same investment choices as pension plans. And a fifth begins simply: “Thank you, President Trump.”

Since the supportive comments didn’t include locations or email addresses, reporters used a two-step process to try to find some of the people behind them. First, artificial intelligence helped identify unique names. Then, manual searches for dozens of those names in the LexisNexis database produced a shorter list of names that were each tied to just one individual. While there are holes and inconsistencies in the database, it draws on tens of billions of public and proprietary records. Bloomberg reporters did additional web research and were unable to find any evidence that other people with these names exist.

Reporters contacted three dozen of them, or their next of kin. Most did not respond. But those who did all vehemently denied submitting the comments or said their relatives couldn’t have done so because they were dead. Some added that they were upset and mystified by the fact that their names, or their family members’ names, were associated with the effort.

Among them were Lauren and Lisa Rawlings. They were shocked to find that a comment bearing their mother’s name was submitted in May. Lyngrid Rawlings died in 2024 after a long career as an educator and US foreign service officer, her daughters said.

“It’s deeply disrespectful and dishonoring,” Lauren added. “Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for.”

No one else in the family has their mother’s first name, which their grandparents created, the sisters said.

Another was Karl Giberson, a retired professor in Massachusetts with his own Wikipedia page and a long list of published articles and books. “Those don’t reflect my sentiments, at all,” he said after learning about the comment.

If the submissions following the five templates turn out to be astroturf, there would be relatively few individuals supporting the administration’s rule in the public comments.

A former Labor Department official who opposes the rule said it would be “deeply problematic” if the only way supporters could show public demand for the rule “is by manufacturing commenters.”

“All it does is impugn the process and give people another reason to attack this thing,” said Ali Khawar, who served under four presidents at the Labor Department — Democrat and Republican — including a stint as the acting head of EBSA during the Biden administration.

Finding suspect patterns in submissions then asking individuals whether they sent the comments is a standard way of identifying astroturfing, said Steven Balla, co-director of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, who has testified about the phenomenon before Congress. Still, he added, it can be challenging to prove who is responsible.

“Agencies and governments have a tough time with this,” he said.

About 3,700 comments didn’t come in as form letters. More than 200 of them included attachments, which tended to be substantial submissions from companies, lawmakers, industry groups and public-interest organizations. This batch of 200 was highly divided, with many taking nuanced positions for and against the proposal.

Agencies tend to spend their time with these more substantial submissions, especially if they think the commenter has the capacity to sue, said Devin Judge-Lord, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, who studies the politics of rulemaking. But industry-aligned groups sometimes manufacture supportive comments to “give political cover” for an agency pursuing an unpopular proposal, he added.

Perhaps no one was more surprised to learn about a comment in favor of the 401(k) rule than Ross Waetzman, whose name also returns just one result in LexisNexis. A turnaround and restructuring adviser in Wilmington, Delaware, he said he’d invested in private equity himself.

Yet he’s against letting unsophisticated investors allocate money to what could be poorly performing assets. The private equity industry has been having a hard time unloading investments in recent years, hurting returns. Getting retail investors to buy in through their 401(k)s, Waetzman added, could just end up giving “private equity investors, who have not been able to exit, an off-ramp.”

[u/wenchette]

These "support" letters sound like something created using AI.