The government just noticed half of workers have no retirement plan

Half of private-sector workers have no workplace retirement plan. That number is from March 2025. The Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's not a secret. It's not new. It's been roughly true for decades.

So the question is: where was the press release in 2010? Where was the executive order in 2015? The Saver's Match — up to a thousand dollars for single filers under about thirty-five thousand in income — was actually created in 2022 under Secure 2.0. That's real money for people who need it. TrumpIRA.gov is supposed to make it easier to access starting next year, with Treasury screening the listed plans for costs and minimums. The portal isn't nothing. Fifty million people without workplace coverage is a real problem and a government website that points them toward vetted low-cost IRAs is better than ignoring it.

But let's say what's also true. The people this is designed for are the same people who got the worst end of every trade deal, every plant closing, every "the economy is doing great" headline for twenty-five years. They didn't get auto-enrollment. They didn't get a pension. They got told the market would work it out. Now they're being offered a website and a match that requires them to opt in — which experts will tell you limits uptake compared to plans that enroll you automatically. The coverage gap didn't appear overnight. It was built, slowly, by a long series of decisions that nobody got fired for. Common sense wasn't wrong.