In 2007 the Pew Charitable Trusts published “Promises with a Price,” the first of a series of reports on the state of public pension plans in the U.S. The situation Pew described was ugly, with a number of states struggling with underfunded plans. But it got much worse after the 2008 financial crisis. Pew tracked the growing problem in a series of reports and gradually shifted from data collection to active participation with lawmakers and other stakeholders to achieve change. One of the key figures: David Draine, 32, who started at Pew in 2007, working as an intern on the first pension report. Today, Draine, who has a BA in art history from Princeton University and an MA in public policy from Johns Hopkins University, is a senior researcher at Pew and the principal investigator on pensions. An important focus of Pew’s work is analyzing different models for public pensions. “What we have seen in a number of states is a growing interest in different hybrid approaches” combining defined benefit and defined contribution funds, Draine says. One of Pew’s biggest successes is Kentucky, which passed legislation in 2013 to implement a hybrid public pension plan. In Kentucky and elsewhere Pew has partnered with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (No. 2), infuriating some groups, particularly in organized labor, which see the apolitical Pew lending legitimacy to the newer, more contentious foundation. Pew’s work is not solely focused on reform, however. The trust has also begun looking into investment performance and pension governance. “We are trying to better understand what are the variations in performance among the states and to what can we attribute the difference,” Draine says.
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David Draine
Senior Researcher
Pew Charitable Trusts
PNR
The 2014 Pension 40