GovernmentExecutive.com

Everybody wants to get new federal employees automatically enrolled in the Thrift Savings Plan. First, it was new Federal Workforce Subcommittee Chair Stephen Lynch. Now, Henry Waxman's reintroduced his tobacco bill with a package of TSP reforms including automatic enrollment, attached. A similar piece of legislation passed the House last year.

This go-round, so similar to the endless debates over pay, illustrates the strengths and the weakness of Congressional control over much of the TSP. The legislative process means that change can't happen precipitously or recklessly--if the TSP decided it wanted to go big on credit default swaps, for example, the market as a whole would have moved on to something else by the time the TSP got authorized to buy into risky investments. But it also means that it takes forever to advance an idea, even when there's consensus on it. The Employee Thrift Advisory Council and the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board are signed up as saying automatic enrollment's a good thing. Leading lawmakers support it. And yet, we're still waiting for automatic enrollment because it's really hard to get lawmakers to pay attention to federal employee issues long enough to pass bills that affect them.