Immediate Effects

I'll have more coming on today's Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board meeting later this afternoon, but for now, one tidbit stands out to me. Since automatic agency contributions to employees' Thrift Savings Plan accounts went live in the June 21 payroll cycle, the number of employee participants in the TSP has grown by about 100,000, almost a full year's-worth of increased enrollments. That's fairly dramatic. When automatic agency contributions went live, in other words, new accounts got opened for about 100,000 employees. Not all of those folks have made their fund elections, or started making their own contributions, but the board anticipates that those new enrollees will, at some point soon, do that. It's something of a dry run for automatic enrollment, when those numbers could increase even more substantially.