< The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

J. Mark Iwry, 65, has been working to enhance retirement income security for U.S. workers since he served in the Clinton administration. In February 2006, Iwry, then a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and David John, then at the Heritage Foundation (now working at the AARP and Brookings), unveiled the Automatic IRA program to ensure that all U.S. workers are enrolled in a savings program. A feature of every federal budget since 2009, when Iwry was appointed to his current job as senior adviser to the secretary and deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, the AutoIRA has yet to pass Congress. When the program began to stall, the Harvard Law School and John F. Kennedy School of Government grad and former Georgetown University professor sought a simpler solution. In January, Treasury launched the My Retirement Account program (myRA) after beta testing; President Obama announced it in his 2015 State of the Union address. “We think it’s a really attractive option to help expand coverage to new savers: a no-cost, safe, principal-protected Roth IRA invested in a U.S. savings bond,” Iwry says. Meanwhile, states have begun to create their own retirement plans —some, like the Illinois Secure Choice Savings Program, modeled after the AutoIRA. Iwry hopes myRA will become part of the new state initiatives.

 
The 2015 Pension 40

1. Bruce Rauner Illinois 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation Sponsored Podcast- Capturing Alpha: A Bridge Between Quantitative and Fundamental Disciplines Sponsored by Fidelity Investments October 21, 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