Secure 2.0 Act: A Timeline

The massive 2023 spending bill that President Joe Biden signed into law on Dec. 30 included sweeping changes to the retirement planning landscape via the Secure 2.0 Act, but not all of those changes will be immediate.

Secure 2.0 was enacted three years after the Secure Act of 2019 was signed into law.

“Significant retirement legislation since the 1970s has been subject to larger political and legislative forces, and has come in fits and starts,” 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, told ThinkAdvisor Wednesday in an email. “Sometimes many years pass without major legislation; during other periods (as in the early and mid 1980s), Congress enacts major retirement changes nearly every year. In fact, on occasion, our private pension system has experienced legislative fatigue, hard pressed to process successive rapid changes to the rules.”

Secure 2.0 “came about as an achievable compromise package after Congress was unable to agree on the game-changing nationwide automatic IRA proposal to pursue near universal coverage, which originally had bipartisan co-sponsorship,” Iwry said.

Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told ThinkAdvisor Wednesday in an email, that “piecing together that amount of substance in a thoughtful and politically balanced way is incredibly challenging.” Secure 2.0′s “passage is a testament to the tireless work of many talented Hill staffers.”