Scott and DeSaulnier introduce three House retirement bills on fiduciary advice and ERISA standing

Three retirement bills introduced during Thursday's pro forma House session arrived as conditions on a bill Congress has not yet written: Representatives Bobby Scott and Mark DeSaulnier want any future SECURE 3.0 to include a rewritten definition of "fiduciary," a new path to court for plan participants, and limits on mandatory arbitration clauses. Scott, of Virginia, is the ranking member on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and sponsored two of the measures; DeSaulnier, of California, holds the ranking position on its Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee. The third bill, on arbitration, had no identified sponsor and no public text.

Scott put the condition in his own terms: "We must reverse course and advance an agenda that protects workers' retirement savings and strengthens their ability to enforce their rights under ERISA," he said, adding that "if Congress considers a 'SECURE 3.0' retirement bill in the future, these pro-worker bills must be included."

The Workers Retirement Savings Protection Act of 2026, Scott's first detailed bill, would define a fiduciary as an individual who, for a fee, renders advice or makes recommendations about investments, explicitly naming rollovers among the recommendations that trigger the label. Current ERISA applies the fiduciary label to advisers who render investment advice for a fee or other compensation, direct or indirect; the bill would spell out that those payments include commissions and a broad range of compensation from any source when the payment is connected to, or results from, an adviser's recommendation.

The drafting work is in the phrase "from any source." Under current text, a payment that reaches an adviser other than directly can be argued to fall outside the fee-for-advice trigger, and the bill forecloses that reading on its face by listing commissions and payments from any source among the compensation that confers fiduciary status. Because a payment that results from a recommendation is enough, the trigger is the recommendation itself rather than the advisory relationship. Whether that reads as a clarification or an expansion is likely to be contested; the sentence structure points to the second reading.

Rollover recommendations already sit on the policy calendar: in August, Treasury and the IRS proposed a voluntary, electronic-first rollover framework under SECURE 2.0, work aimed at ending the paper check. Scott's bill approaches the same transaction from the advice side, attaching fiduciary status to the recommendation that precedes the transfer of assets.

The Protecting Workers Benefits Act of 2026, also Scott's, answers Thole v. U.S. Bank, the Supreme Court decision holding that defined benefit plan participants lacked standing to sue fiduciaries for breach because no individual financial loss had occurred. The bill would let participants bring claims as assignees on behalf of the plan, a structure borrowed from the False Claims Act's whistleblower provisions, though it is unclear which plan types beyond the defined benefit facts would be covered.

The structure is the point: a False Claims Act action is brought by a private party on behalf of an injured entity rather than for the plaintiff's own damages, and the assignee mechanism here points the same way, leaving the plan as the party in whose name the claim proceeds. That answers a ruling that turned on the absence of individual loss, since a participant suing on the plan's behalf would not be asserting one, though it is unclear how courts would treat such an assignment.

Arbitration is the third subject and the least developed; the bill was not named and its text not described, so the reach of any limit on mandatory arbitration clauses cannot be measured from this week's report. Read together, the three go at enforcement from three directions: the fiduciary definition sets who owes the duty, the standing bill sets who may enforce it, and the arbitration measure would set where the dispute is heard.

Sitting as ranking members puts both sponsors on the minority side of the full committee and its Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee, a position from which bills are more likely negotiation terms than moving vehicles. Scott's operative word is "must": the bills, in his telling, would have to be included if Congress takes up a SECURE 3.0, and no markup or vote was announced.

Scott's office circulated endorsements from the AFL-CIO, the Alliance for Retired Americans and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. DeSaulnier framed the package in enforcement terms, saying the legislation "would help safeguard the promise of ERISA so that workers can retire with financial security and dignity by cracking down on employer abuses and protecting workers' access to recourse under the law."

That leaves the third SECURE iteration where it has been: potential. This week produced two draft texts and a condition: one bill closes off arguments about indirect compensation, another is built around the standing defect in Thole, and Scott says any future SECURE 3.0 must carry both. Whether either gets a hearing while its sponsors sit in the minority is the next thing to watch.