For more than a decade, private equity has been on a quest to gain access to the nearly $14 trillion of  hard-earned money in workers’ defined contribution retirement accounts, two-thirds in 401(k) plans. On March 30, the Trump administration handed private equity, private credit, crypto, and the full array of alternative investments the keys to this golden kingdom. 

Their timing could hardly be worse.

Employers have long been reluctant to include such assets in workers’ defined contribution retirement accounts —– mainly  401(k)plans. In 2024, only 4 percent of defined contribution plans offered alternative investments. The reason why was always simple: Employers are fiduciaries, which means they must make decisions about retirement investments that are in their employees’ best interest. They must be prudent in curating a menu of retirement plan options for their workers. And they have been successfully sued for lack of prudence by workers whose retirement accounts held high fee, illiquid, risky investments that failed to perform.

The private equity industry, meanwhile, attributed the low take up to employers’ fear of costly litigation, and has lobbied hard for the Department of Labor and Securities and Exchange Commission to come........

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