The Obama-era program dubbed “myRA,” a Roth-style starter retirement savings account launched nationally in 2015 to help middle-income wage earners save more for retirement, has met an early death under the Donald Trump Treasury Department, and will be shut down in the coming months, the department announced Friday.
The department lauded the goal of nudging people to save, but noted that few had signed up for the program. As of December, there were only 20,000 participants.
Prominent retirement savings advocate Dallas Salisbury, the former longtime head of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, has said the benefits of myRA were overpromised.
The maximum that an individual could put into the plan was $15,000, which would not have had much impact on retirement security for those without an on-the-job retirement savings plan, Salisbury said.
Those who have enrolled are being notified of the upcoming changes, including information on moving their myRA savings to another Roth IRA, the Treasury Department said in the announcement.
Obama announced the creation of myRA in his 2014 State of the Union address. The idea was to get savers into a starter IRA if they didn’t have enough to meet the thresholds of other IRA plans.
Participants’ money went into government bonds, whose interest rate was the same as that federal employees receive in the variable rate Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) Government Securities Investment Fund.