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The 2015 Pension 40: Randy DeFrehn

No. 23 Randy DeFrehn Executive Director / National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans

ByTyler Davies

December 22, 2015

<The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

Randy DeFrehn

Executive Director / National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans

Last year’s rank: 6

Randy DeFrehn, a former benefits consultant at Segal Co., scored a career success at the end of last year, when he helped shepherd the Kline-Miller Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 through Congress as an add-on to a year-end omnibus bill during the December lame-duck session. The MPRA, a revision to ERISA, allows trustees of “severely troubled” multiemployer pension funds to cut promised benefits to plan members; it could apply to 20 percent of those plans, which cover a total of 10.4 million union members. Among the bill’s staunchest opponents are Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has sponsored a bill aimed at reversing MPRA; the Pension Rights Center (No. 22); and many union officials. “No plan has to do this except for ones headed for insolvency,” says DeFrehn, 63, who has lobbied for the Taft-Hartley community since 2001, when he became executive director of the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans. The idea behind pension cutbacks — as first outlined in a 2013 NCCMP report, “Solutions Not Bailouts” — was to save a partial benefit for participants in failing plans now rather than wait for the money to run out. The report also recommended redesigning current pension plans to create a pooled defined contribution model, an idea introduced in a congressional hearing earlier this year.

The 2015 Pension 40