President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Thursday that aims to make retirement plans easier to find for millions of workers whose jobs do not come with one. The order directs the Treasury Department to create an online marketplace called TrumpIRA.gov, where workers without employer-provided plans could choose their own retirement account.
The move is designed to push more people into savings plans they can control and compare. TrumpIRA.gov would let workers filter options by cost, minimum contribution and minimum balance, while Treasury vets the plans listed on the site without partnering with any specific financial institution.
The order also puts a federal marketing campaign behind the effort and tells Treasury to issue guidance on how private-sector donors could contribute to workers’ IRAs. It further directs Treasury and the National Economic Council to draft legislative recommendations that could broaden the idea, including automatically enrolling workers in private-sector IRAs and expanding eligibility for the Saver’s Match.
That match, created by Congress in 2022, is built to help lower-income savers. Workers making less than $35,500, or couples making less than $71,000, can use the plan to claim it, and the federal government is set to match contributions from qualifying low-income workers with up to $1,000 starting next year. Treasury must have the website ready by 2027, when the Saver’s Match goes live.
The effort comes with a built-in comparison to the past. Barack Obama unveiled a similar retirement-savings push in his 2014 State of the Union address, and the Treasury-run myRA program that followed is now defunct. Trump shut it down in 2017 after calling its demand extremely low and saying the cost to taxpayers was too high. That earlier program was limited to low-return Treasuries, a constraint the new marketplace is meant to avoid.
About 54 million people who work full- or part-time do not have access to an employer-provided retirement plan, according to the Economic Innovation Group. Another 27 million people eligible for the Saver’s Match are not enrolled in a plan where they can collect it. The administration is betting that a federally run marketplace can reach those workers more effectively than the state-run online IRA systems that have largely failed to gain traction.
The new site is not expected to replace state programs that require employers without retirement plans to automatically enroll workers in state-run IRAs. But it could give Washington a more direct role in steering people toward savings accounts, at a moment when millions still lack a straightforward path into retirement planning.
