< The 2014 Pension 40: The Battle Is On
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David Draine
Senior Researcher
Pew Charitable Trusts
PNR
In 2007 the Pew Charitable Trusts published “Promises with a Price,” the first of a series of reports on the state of public pension plans in the U.S. The situation Pew described was ugly, with a number of states struggling with underfunded plans. But it got much worse after the 2008 financial crisis. Pew tracked the growing problem in a series of reports and gradually shifted from data collection to active participation with lawmakers and other stakeholders to achieve change. One of the key figures: David Draine, 32, who started at Pew in 2007, working as an intern on the first pension report. Today, Draine, who has a BA in art history from Princeton University and an MA in public policy from Johns Hopkins University, is a senior researcher at Pew and the principal investigator on pensions. An important focus of Pew’s work is analyzing different models for public pensions. “What we have seen in a number of states is a growing interest in different hybrid approaches” combining defined benefit and defined contribution funds, Draine says. One of Pew’s biggest successes is Kentucky, which passed legislation in 2013 to implement a hybrid public pension plan. In Kentucky and elsewhere Pew has partnered with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (No. 2), infuriating some groups, particularly in organized labor, which see the apolitical Pew lending legitimacy to the newer, more contentious foundation. Pew’s work is not solely focused on reform, however. The trust has also begun looking into investment performance and pension governance. “We are trying to better understand what are the variations in performance among the states and to what can we attribute the difference,” Draine says.
The 2014 Pension 40
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Bruce Rauner Illinois | John and Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation | Randi Weingarten American Federation of Teachers | Rahm Emanuel Chicago | David Boies Boies, Schiller & Flexner |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans | Damon Silvers AFL-CIO | Laurence Fink BlackRock | Chris Christie New Jersey | Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees’ Retirement System | John Kline Minnesota | J. Mark Iwry U.S. Treasury Department | Gina Raimondo Rhode Island | Phyllis Borzi U.S. Labor Department |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| Orrin Hatch Utah | Abigail Johnson Fidelity Investments | Ted Wheeler Oregon | Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley | James Hoffa International Brotherhood of Teamsters |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| Amy Kessler Prudential Financial | Alejandro García Padilla Puerto Rico | Christopher Klein U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Caifornia | Steven Rhodes Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Michigan | Kevin de León California |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| David Draine Pew Charitable Trusts | Jordan Marks National Public Pension Coalition | Sam Liccardo California | Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business | Karen Ferguson and Karen Friedman Pension Rights Center |
| 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 |
| Timothy Blake Moody’s Investors Service | Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University | Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services | Daniel Loeb Third Point | Judy Mares Employee Benefits Security Administration, U.S. Labor Department |
| 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 |
| Andrew Biggs American Enterprise Institute | Andy Stern Columbia University | Kenneth Mehlman KKR & Co. | Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research | A. Melissa Moye U.S. Treasury Department |
