< The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

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Randy DeFrehn
Executive Director / National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans
Last year’s rank: 6

Randy DeFrehn, a former benefits consultant at Segal Co., scored a career success at the end of last year, when he helped shepherd the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 through Congress as an add-on to a year-end omnibus bill during the December lame-duck session. The MPRA, a revision to ERISA, allows trustees of “severely troubled” multiemployer pension funds to cut promised benefits to plan members; it could apply to 20 percent of those plans, which cover a total of 10.4 million union members. Among the bill’s staunchest opponents are Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has sponsored a bill aimed at reversing MPRA; the Pension Rights Center (No. 22); and many union officials. “No plan has to do this except for ones headed for insolvency,” says DeFrehn, 63, who has lobbied for the Taft-Hartley community since 2001, when he became executive director of the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans. The idea behind pension cutbacks — as first outlined in a 2013 NCCMP report, “Solutions Not Bailouts” — was to save a partial benefit for participants in failing plans now rather than wait for the money to run out. The report also recommended redesigning current pension plans to create a pooled defined contribution model, an idea introduced in a congressional hearing earlier this year.

 

 
The 2015 Pension 40

1. Bruce Rauner Illinois 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation Sponsored Seeking Resilience in Gravity-defying Stock Markets Sponsored by Schroders October 20, 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. TreasuryDepartment 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