Retirement in America is graded by employer luck, and the grade compounds: the worker whose HR office picked a one-percent plan retires with roughly a quarter less than her identical twin at the firm that picked a cheap one. The New American Accord removes the luck. Every worker gets the account the federal government already gives its own — index and lifecycle funds at 0.035 to 0.051 percent a year, portable across every job a lifetime now contains — and, under the Accord's broader rule against tax preferences, the account is deliberately, unapologetically post-tax. Nearly free, fully honest, and owned by the saver alone.
The fee arithmetic first, because it is the quiet scandal. One percent a year sounds like a tip; compounded over a working life it consumes on the order of a fifth to a third of final wealth. The industry's own data locates the burden: small-company 401(k) plans commonly carry total costs near one percent while giant plans negotiate a fraction of it — the worker pays for the size of her employer. The counterexample has run for four decades: the Thrift Savings Plan, holding the retirements of federal workers, soldiers, and Members of Congress, charges thirty-five to fifty-one cents per thousand dollars; fewer than one percent of the world's roughly 170,000 investment funds operate cheaper. Extending it is exactly as radical as that sentence.
The post-tax design is the part that will surprise, so here is the reasoning in the open. The Accord's ruled principle is that every tax preference at scale is captured by whoever can afford the engineering — the deferral that was sold as the carpenter's break became the nine-figure sheltered account — and the research is brutal about the bargain: the landmark Danish registry study found roughly 85 percent of savers don't respond to tax subsidies at all, so each subsidy dollar bought about a cent of new saving, while automatic enrollment moved saving powerfully. The deferral apparatus, among the largest tax expenditures in the federal budget, has mostly paid people to relocate money, not to save it. The Accord keeps what works — the automation, the default, the compounding — and returns the preference's cost to the open ledger that funds the floor. For the median saver the arithmetic approximately washes: the deferral forgone and the fees escaped are the same order of magnitude, and the saver keeps portability, simplicity, and independence from anyone's paperwork. For the large saver, the shelter is simply gone — which is the point, stated without apology: paying for the Accord is the requirement, and the floor is what the shelters claimed to be for.
Two consequences belong in the open rather than the fine print. Employer "matches" become what they always were — compensation — taxed like the rest of pay. Some employers will drop matches rather than gross them up; the honest answer is that the match was wages wearing a costume, graded by the same employer luck as the fees, and the dollars survive as pay while the account they belong in no longer depends on HR. And an industry contracts: recordkeepers, plan administrators, and the deferral-optimization bar join the managed reallocation the Accord's simplifications cause, with the same bridge — while advisors keep the entire market for what clients actually buy on purpose: planning, judgment, active management, and every ambition above a cheap diversified default.
That default is the deeper principle. Wealth in America runs through defaults — wherever the paperwork put you is where most people stay for decades — and the Accord's position is that the default should be excellent and nearly free precisely so that everything above it must compete on merit. Markets discipline prices only where the customer can walk; the public account is the alternative that never closes. A firm charging one percent will finally face the only question a fee should face — one percent for what? — and where the answer is real, clients will stay, and should.
A retirement should be a function of wages, discipline, and the market's returns. The Accord strikes employer luck from the equation and lets compounding work for the person who earned the money.
Sources: tsp.gov 2025 expense ratios and the <1%-of-170,000-funds comparison; 401(k) Averages Book 2025 (~1.08%, $5M plans); ICI 2025 (0.26% avg equity fund); Chetty et al., QJE 2014 (Danish registry — verify exact figures on publish); fee-drag and fee-vs-deferral arithmetic: state assumptions when publishing (workbook comparison pending — update the "approximately washes" sentence if the scored run says otherwise).