Key takeaways

President Trump has veered away from the path that previous administrations have taken on 401(k) and other retirement plans. Instead of protecting the millions of workers with retirement accounts, his administration is trying to knock down guardrails that protect retirement savers.

Trump is proposing to make risky investments more widely available to ordinary savers and make it harder to sue the retirement plan sponsors and advisers who encourage these types of investments.

What kinds of problems could these changes cause?

• Some retirement savers might experience life-altering losses if retirement plan sponsors and advisers steer them into risky and hard-to-value investments like private equity and cryptocurrencies.
• Investment options that Trump is promoting include privately traded investments that may be difficult to sell when workers are ready for retirement and digital collectibles that have no intrinsic value but are simply a gamble that someone will pay more for them later.
• Marketing risky investments to millions of retirement plan participants is a way to bail out billionaires at the expense of ordinary savers at a time when pension funds and other sophisticated investors are souring on some of these investments.
• A speculative bubble like the one in the roaring 1920s might grow and lead to a crash with economywide repercussions.

The Trump family has seen enormous profits from cryptocurrencies in 2025. The crypto-based businesses they set up last year may be worth as much as $2 billion.

In an executive order dated August 7, 2025, President Trump called for a reexamination of regulations and guidance for retirement plans. Trump asked regulators to encourage retirement plan administrators to include risky options like alternative assets (or “alts”) in 401(k) and similar retirement plans. Alternative assets could be funds invested in private equity and cryptocurrencies, assets that lack strict regulation and whose value and risk can be hard to assess compared with other types of investments. Because of this, many consider alts to be unsuitable for retirement plans. Trump’s executive order listed direct and indirect interests in private market investments, real estate, digital assets, commodities, infrastructure, and longevity risk-sharing pools.

Currently there are no explicit bans on offering these types of investments in participant-directed retirement plans, but employers and advisers who serve as retirement plan fiduciaries can be sued for including inappropriately risky and costly assets among investment options. (Fiduciaries are required by law to act in the best interests of retirement plan participants.) Outside of retirement plans, marketing private equity and other largely unregulated alternative assets to small investors is mostly prohibited by securities laws, regulations, and agency guidance—though cryptocurrencies and other digital assets can be sold to anyone.

Whether due to fiduciaries’ litigation fear or common sense, alts like private equity have so far made little headway in the 401(k) space, though some major players began marketing managed funds with alternative asset components to 401(k) plan sponsors even before Trump issued his executive order.