< The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

Nearly five years of work paid off in June for Ted Wheeler, 53, when Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed a bill allowing for the creation of a private sector retirement savings plan for workers who can’t get one through their employers. Wheeler, Oregon’s state treasurer since 2010, was named chairman of the Oregon Retirement Savings Task Force in 2011, whose goal was to recommend a plan to the legislature for private sector workers. “There were people who thought it was the greatest thing ever and people who thought it was the beginning of the end for civilization,” says Wheeler, who has an undergraduate degree in economics from Stanford University, an MBA from Columbia University and a master’s in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Many questioned whether the initiative was necessary considering the private retirement products available, but Wheeler contends that if employees don’t have access to auto-enrollment at work, all those options don’t help. “If we simply continue with the status quo, with about half of Americans not saving adequately for retirement, the cost to taxpayers will be staggering as more and more people rely upon costly government safety-net programs,” he says. Oregon’s $87.9 billion state retirement system was recently listed in a Wall Street Journal analysis as the fifth healthiest in the country, with 95.9 percent of future obligations funded. Wheeler, who is running for mayor of his hometown of Portland, attributes the system’s health to strong earnings, which he hopes will continue to improve with the impending adoption of BlackRock’s Aladdin portfolio management system.

 
The 2015 Pension 40

1. Bruce Rauner Illinois 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation Model Portfolios to Deliver Alternative Asset Exposure Sponsored by BlackRock April 29, 2025 3. Chris Christie New Jersey 4. Randi Weingarten AmericanFederation of Teachers 5. Phyllis Borzi U.S. Department of Labor

6. Kevin de León California 7. Alejandro García Padilla Commonwealth ofPuerto Rico 8. Laurence Fink BlackRock 9. Rahm Emanuel Chicago 10. Sean McGarvey North AmericanBuilding Trades Unions

11. John Kline Minnesota 12. J. Mark Iwry U.S. Treasury Department 13. Damon Silvers AFL-CIO 14. Jeffrey Immelt General Electric Co. 15. Joshua Gotbaum Brookings Institution

16. Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. 17. Mark Mullet Washington 18. Terry O'Sullivan Laborers' International Union of North America 19. Raymond Dalio Bridgewater Associates 20. Ted Wheeler Oregon

21. Thomas Nyhan Central States Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund 22. Karen Ferguson & Karen Friedman Pensions Rights Center 23. Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee forMultiemployer Plans 24. Robert O'Keef Motorola Solutions 25. Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley

26. Kenneth Feinberg The Law Offices of Kenneth R. Feinberg 27. Orrin Hatch Utah 28. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University 29. Ian Lanoff Groom Law Group 30. Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business

31. Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees' Retirement System 32. Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services 33. Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research 34. Denise Nappier Connecticut 35. W. Thomas Reeder Jr. Pension BenefitGuaranty Corp.

36. Hank Kim National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems 37. Paul Singer Elliott Management Corp. 38. Bailey Childers National PublicPension Coalition 39. Amy Kessler Prudential Financial 40. Judy Mares U.S. Labor Department