EBSA Articulates Trump Administration's Views on Pension Divestment Campaigns at OECD Event

March 2, 2026
Remarks delivered by EBSA Senior Policy Advisor Jack Lund at the OECD Conference Center in Paris.

On behalf of the United States Department of Labor, I want to thank the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for hosting this roundtable on Global Financial Markets in Paris. The Department of Labor looks forward to fostering strong relationships with the OECD’s other 37 member countries. Our goal, as my colleague Justin Danhof stated last September, is to advocate for policies that promote innovation, freedom, and economic opportunity, both in the United States and globally.

Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the Department of Labor is focused on helping employers deliver robust, safe, and affordable benefits to their employees and their beneficiaries. We are, once again, putting the American worker first.

The Department of Labor, and more specifically, the Employee Benefits Security Administration, assists more than 153 million workers, retirees, and their families covered by employer-sponsored benefit plans. This includes overseeing more than 800,000 private retirement plans, 2.6 million health plans, and 500,000 welfare benefit plans, which collectively hold more than $17 trillion in assets. Unlike the empty promises some governments sometimes make, that $17 trillion is secure and will be used for the benefit of American workers.

Today, I want to discuss one specific, but extremely consequential principle outlined in the IOPS Principles of Private Pension Supervision—that pension supervisory authorities should support actions “with the primary goal of protecting the interests of members and beneficiaries.”

Operating pensions with this “primary goal” of protecting the interests of pensioners is a strong standard. But today I suggest that member countries adopt an even better standard—what we in the United States call the “exclusive purpose” or “exclusive benefit” rule— operating pensions with the “exclusive purpose” of protecting the financial interests of pensioners, the distinction being the difference between a goal that can be one of many goals or of a single goal that alone informs all decision-making to the exclusion of all other goals.

Before I tell you why our rule makes more sense, I want to call your attention to a pernicious version of an age-old concern. This grave problem arises when precious resources that are supposed to have been set aside to provide for the dignified retirement of workers are instead co-opted for other purposes, often attempts at politically charged social engineering. I speak specifically today of the divestment of pension assets from Israel and some of its trading partners.

If the pension supervisors for OECD member countries who divested from American companies including a prominent American equipment manufacturer and Israeli banking institutions thought we were not paying attention, they were wrong. The United States was, and is, watching. In fact, the United States views it as a reprehensible and grotesque form of irresponsibility to try to placate the destructive mobs marching through your streets demanding the violent end to the world’s only Jewish state by divesting from it, and its trading partners, with your pension assets. I’ll say it again; this is a reprehensible and grotesque form of irresponsibility. Oh, by the way, you can never mollify a mob. To them, that’s a feature of their system, not a bug—a benefit of their tactics, not a disadvantage.

Divestment campaigns like this also do not satisfy any pensioner-focused standard of conduct, even under the more permissive primary goal framework currently in the Principles of Private Pension Supervision. How can a decision by an OECD member country’s pension fund to divest, for example, from an American equipment manufacturer because of the legitimate use of that company’s products by another OECD member country, have any connection to—much less a primary goal of—protecting the retirement benefits of the workers in that pension fund? The answer is it cannot.

But once any purpose or goal, other than the exclusive purpose of protecting workers, is allowed to infect decision-making on pension investment, this divestment monstrosity is what awaits you at the bottom of the metaphorical slippery slope. It starts with a sacrificial offering to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)—investing with managers based on irrelevant personal characteristics rather than the content and performance of their portfolios. Then it becomes an obsession with trying to solve the world’s climate issues through the global financial markets. And, before you know it, your pension system has been hijacked by people who have no more sympathy toward their victims than any other hijacker.

The way to prevent this explosive ending is by prohibiting, altogether, the consideration of factors other than the provision of retirement benefits. That is precisely how our system is designed.

This is accomplished through two parallel or interlocking provisions of law. The first, our landmark retirement statute, known as ERISA, requires that fiduciaries responsible for the management of private retirement assets act “for the exclusive purpose of . . . providing benefits to participants and beneficiaries.” The second, in our Internal Revenue Code, makes certain generous tax benefits contingent on retirement plans being managed “for the exclusive benefit” of the participant-employees or their beneficiaries.

Together these provisions require managers of American retirement benefit plans to invest to maximize risk-adjusted return on that investment to the exclusion of all other factors. Managers who deviate from this framework risk personal legal liability, including criminal penalties in the most egregious cases, and jeopardize the tax qualification of the plans which they manage.

While this may seem like a significant constraint, our experience is that it frees excellent investment performance. In the United States investment managers and pension supervisors are extremely skilled in managing risk and seeking maximum returns for their investors. But people with that skillset are poor social engineers.

This is fully consistent with the macro-trends I have just described. Employer-sponsored defined contribution benefit plans in the United States are funded to the tune of $14 trillion, with another $3 trillion in employer-based defined benefit plan funding. Not to mention the $19 trillion in individual retirement accounts and $9.5 trillion in public defined benefit plans. In other words, a focus on maximizing risk-adjusted return on investment for the exclusive benefit of retirees and their beneficiaries works. And it works well.

Elsewhere in the world, while promises may be generous, funding is a serious problem. And instead of addressing that significant financial problem head on, some pension supervisors are acting like Just Stop Oil protesters. This behavior tends, at best, to be empty virtue-signaling and, as I just described, at worst, a morally indefensible assault on fellow-member-states.

But do not feel too sorry yet for the boycotted industries. Despite the offensiveness of the policies of some member-states, those policies are unlikely to have much effect. Their divestments and boycotts are an investment opportunity for our tens of trillions of dollars of capital. And our plans aren’t going anywhere; they are going to continue to invest in United States and Israeli industry. But it won’t be because we want to make some kind of social or political statement, as righteous as such a statement might be. It will be because your divestment made our investments all the more lucrative for our own pensioners whose interests our retirement system places above all else.

In 2010, OECD members made the right decision to admit Israel as a new member over vociferous antisemitic objections. We invite all members to once again make the right decision—to cast off the constraints of social investing and let your pension funds work for the exclusive purpose of their members.