Secure Act 2.0 Could Be Signed Into Law Next Month

The sweeping Secure Act 2.0 retirement bill could become law “within the next five or six weeks,” as House and Senate lawmakers are busy hammering out which provisions should be included, J. Mark Iwry, the head of national retirement policy during the Obama-Biden administration who’s now a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Wednesday.

Speaking on a webcast held by the Worldwide Employee Benefits Network, Iwry said that Secure Act 2.0  has “major momentum,” as all four congressional committees with retirement jurisdiction — the two tax-writing committees and two labor committees — have “unanimously approved different versions” of Secure 2.0, branded as separate bills.

Those “unanimous approvals,” Iwry continued, “overlap heavily — a lot of the same provisions have been agreed to by more than one committee.”

Secure Act 2.0 may contain up to 100 provisions and has been given a 40% chance of passage during the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, Iwry relayed.

“A lot of provisions are now being considered, negotiated, combined, reconciled to form a single package that the House and Senate could act [on] and president could sign possibly as soon as next month,” Iwry said.

Will Congress enact Secure Act 2.0 in the lame-duck session?

“Right now, Senate and House staffs are completing an informal pre-conference process where they’re combining the two Senate bills and a House bill — melding them together into a single bill that would be suitable for enactment,” Iwry said, adding that there are only a “few” controversial issues to negotiate — such as expanding eligibility for the Savers Credit as well as auto-enrollment in workplace retirement plans and auto-escalation of contributions.

“Neither of these will hold up the bill,” he said.

Usually, Iwry continued, “retirement bills have to be tacked on” to budget, tax or other must-pass legislation. “We do have a budget update that needs to happen in this lame-duck session…If it’s a major budget [process] it would be easier to tack on Secure 2.0.”

Congress, Iwry added, “has a lot of other priorities during the lame duck; … Secure 2.0 is not one of the top three or four things on the minds of most members of Congress. So there’s a decent chance that it [Secure Act 2.0] gets edged out off of the radar screen during the next six weeks.”

But the bottom line: “We’ve got a very decent chance” of passage, Iwry said.