TIAA’s FUTUREWISE conference wasn’t just a techy retirement event—it launched a full-scale media and product push framing America as facing a “retirement-income crisis.”
But behind the headlines is a coordinated effort to shift workers away from secure public pensions and toward private annuity products that transfer risk to individuals and boost corporate profits.
From new Vanguard partnerships to white papers that downplay pensions, TIAA is shaping a narrative that benefits Wall Street—not public workers.
NPPC breaks down what’s really happening, who stands to lose, and why defined benefit pensions remain the strongest path to retirement security.
Read the full analysis.
Last month in Washington, D.C., TIAA convened its FUTUREWISE conference—an event that doubled as a high-profile launch for its media campaign and product rollout. Framing the U.S. as facing a “retirement-income crisis,” TIAA executives cast the company’s growing portfolio of annuity-based, defined-contribution–oriented products as the supposed solution.
TIAA’s Media Blitz
The timing is strategic. Coordinated with FUTUREWISE, TIAA rolled out The Common Thread—a white paper that subtly downplays the effectiveness of traditional defined-benefit (DB) pensions and promotes “lifetime income” products as the preferred alternative. The company also bolstered this framing with high-visibility interviews placed in national outlets.
Simultaneously, TIAA announced a major partnership with Vanguard to launch a target-date collective investment trust (CIT) in 2026 containing a built-in TIAA annuity. This structure embeds a private annuity inside a 401(k)-type investment vehicle, effectively turning a standard target-date fund into a bargain-bin pension substitute—one controlled by private insurers rather than public pension boards, Elected officials or employers.
TIAA’s messaging, research, and product development all point in the same direction: a shift away from public pensions and toward privatized, individualized retirement accounts that rely on corporate “lifetime-income” guarantees. The firm’s framing of “modernization,” “portability,” and “retirement adequacy” is designed to move policymakers toward this model and insinuate that the evolution in that direction is a forgone conclusion.
Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets are amplifying TIAA’s narrative. CNBC’s coverage of the FUTUREWISE launch repeated the company’s warning about a national “retirement crisis” and highlighted its annuity-centric solutions. Other reporting has focused on TIAA’s push for policy reforms that soften regulatory barriers to embedding annuities in employer plans, a key goal CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett has urged federal policymakers to adopt.
Across the financial media coverage, the pattern is consistent: TIAA presents itself as responding to inherent structural retirement challenges, when in reality it is helping construct the profit-motivated case for its own products.
Where TIAA Gets it Wrong
For public-sector workers, the implications are direct. The TIAA report and the FUTUREWISE media campaign implicitly portray DB pensions as outdated or inadequate, despite evidence that DB pensions remain the most cost-efficient and secure retirement model available. TIAA’s own data acknowledges the superior performance of defined benefit pensions in replacing income for lower and moderate-income workers, who make up the bulk of public servants.
The narrative that pensions are “insufficient” or “unsustainable” sets the stage for expanding DC and annuity hybrids—forms that shift risk from employers to individuals and create the very market TIAA is positioning itself to dominate. At times, they even market their products as DB-like, drawing on the popularity of old school pensions. They also seem particularly ambitious in marketing these products to the most significant gap identified in their analysis: the long-suffering upper middle class.
TIAA’s own research from 2022 indicated “substantial variation in access to workplace retirement plans, accumulated savings, and retirement income by race and ethnicity,” with Blacks and Hispanics holding less than half of the retirement savings as Whites, in their analysis. It’s difficult to see how the problems presented in The Common Thread would address this deficiency, as the paper states that “nearly all Social Security-including plans will meet (or even exceed) the needs of low earners, only a third will provide sufficient income for the high earners.” From TIAA’s perspective, we apparently have a “retirement crisis” because well-off retirees with defined benefit pensions and Social Security may not be able to maintain their comfortable lifestyle in retirement.
Make no mistake: Defined benefit pensions are by far the most effective vehicle for achieving upward mobility for women and people of color. The Closing the Gap report from Nari Rhee, PhD, director of the Retirement Security Program at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, notes, “Pensions’ anti-poverty effect is the largest for Black and Latino retirees and retirees of all races who do not have a four-year college degree.” An Economic Policy Institute analysis stated that the shift from defined benefit pensions to the type of DC and hybrid plans TIAA is hyping, “has been a disaster for lower-income, black, Hispanic, non-college-educated, and single workers.”
In other words, TIAA’s broad rhetoric around a retirement crisis is in bad faith, as it amplifies general fears about retirement and pension funding, while the core demographic they aim to support is already well off, contradicting their stated equity goals. Finally, TIAA immediately follows up their faulty diagnosis with a profit-motivated prescription.
This is particularly concerning in states where public workers do not participate in Social Security. TIAA’s own research highlights these workers as most at risk of income shortfalls, making their pension systems prime targets for the company’s “lifetime-income” push. Combined with TIAA’s growing alignment with policy actors who oppose public pensions–organizations like the Reason Foundation–this creates a clear warning sign for NPPC state coalition partners.
NPPC will continue monitoring TIAA’s policy and product campaigns and the broader effort to integrate private annuities into public-sector retirement design. As these developments unfold, public workers and policymakers deserve transparent analysis rather than flashy branded marketing narratives. The future of retirement security must be built on evidence—not on the commercial strategies of financial firms already reaping profits from past iterations of austerity and privatization.