Three of the most senior Democrats on retirement policy in Congress are asking federal investigators to examine whether the public comment process behind a major Department of Labor retirement rule was manipulated with fabricated submissions, adding a fraud-investigation dimension to an already contentious fight over private equity and cryptocurrency in workplace retirement plans.
House Education and Workforce Committee ranking member Bobby Scott (D-Va.), House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee ranking member Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have issued a letter demanding that Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel open a criminal investigation into the use of unverifiable or stolen identities to submit public comments.
Separately, Scott and Sanders asked DOL Acting Secretary Keith Sonderling and DOL Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito to investigate the matter directly.
The allegations stem from Bloomberg News reporting published last month, which suggested that nearly 12,000 comments filed in support of the DOL's proposed rule may have been manufactured.
In a sign of potential astroturfing, Bloomberg's investigation identified people who said they never submitted a comment, and others whose relatives could not have filed comments attributed to them because they had died.
The lawmakers flagged a specific irregularity: unlike more than 30,000 comments opposing the rule, the supportive comments in question reportedly failed to include the commenter's city, state or email address.
In their letter to the Justice Department and FBI, the three lawmakers wrote that "federal law prohibits knowingly making any materially false statement or representation" to a federal agency, and said making false statements is a serious crime that has led to prison sentences.
In a separate letter to Sonderling, Scott wrote that the reporting "raises legitimate questions about whether the public comment process for DOL rulemaking has been corrupted."
The comment-letter dispute sits on top of a broader and long-running fight over the DOL's Investment Selection Proposal published in March. The proposed rule would create a process-based safe harbor shielding 401(k) plan fiduciaries from litigation if they document a review of six factors – performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, benchmarking and complexity – before adding an investment option to a plan menu, including options containing private equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure or digital assets.
The proposal traces back to an August 2025 executive order in which President Trump directed the Labor Department to reexamine fiduciary guidance under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act and to prioritize actions that could curb ERISA litigation constraining fiduciaries' judgment on offering alternative-asset options to plan participants. That order, along with the Labor Department proposal, aim to open a defined-contribution market estimated at roughly $14.2 trillion to alternative-asset managers who have historically been shut out of the 401(k) channel.
Scott, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had already opposed the underlying rule well before the comment-letter allegations surfaced. In a June 2 letter urging the DOL to rescind the proposal, the three wrote that "federal efforts to expand retirement income must prioritize cost-effectiveness, stability, and safety" and argued the safe harbor would compound, rather than solve, retirement security problems for American workers.
Independent research suggests the underlying policy debate is more nuanced than either side's talking points.
A study released Monday by the CFA Institute Research and Policy Center found that modest allocations to private equity, private debt, infrastructure, real estate or venture capital each improved risk-adjusted performance in a modeled target-date fund compared with a portfolio holding only public stocks and bonds – though the source of that improvement varied sharply by asset class and depended heavily on how a plan's glide path was designed.
Separate research by Morningstar offered similar tempered support for alts in 401(k)s. Simulating the experience of hundreds of thousands of defined conribution plan participants, it found semiliquid private market funds could marginally improve retirement outcomes, especially for those with higher benefits and lower expected Social Security replacement rates.
Olivier Fines, head of advocacy and policy research at the CFA Institute, said in a statement accompanying the findings that "opening access is not the same as improving retirement outcomes" and that whether an allocation helps depends on several factors.
"As investment risk has shifted from employers to individuals, the relevant test is whether a private market allocation adds value after fees and within the liquidity, valuation, and governance constraints of a defined contribution plan," Fines said.
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