Washington has a bad habit of writing rules and walking away. Decades pass, the world changes, and the rules just sit there. I saw this firsthand at the Office of Management and Budget, where one of the most persistent challenges was not finding new things to regulate — it was getting agencies to honestly reckon with the rules already on the books.

The rules governing retirement investing are overdue for that reckoning. When the laws that decide how Americans save for retirement were written in the Carter administration and haven’t been updated since, that is not prudent caution; it is instead an example of institutional neglect that is in dire need of being addressed.