President Joe Biden has withdrawn the nomination of Deva A. Kyle to lead the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
Kyle, of counsel for law firm Cohen, Weiss and Simon was nominated in July to a five-year term as PBGC director. She would have replaced Gordon Hartogensis, whose term ended in April. Ann Orr was named the PBGC’s acting director in early May.
The White House in a Nov. 14 announcement did not provide a reason for the withdrawal of Kyle’s nomination, but with President-elect Donald Trump’s victory earlier this month and a dwindling legislative calendar, Kyle’s Senate confirmation was unlikely.
Her nomination was referred jointly to the Senate Finance and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees, but neither had held a hearing to consider Kyle. The Senate Finance Committee had a Nov.14 hearing scheduled in which Kyle was slated to testify, but she was removed from the witness list shortly before the hearing.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for additional details, and Kyle couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
In her current role, Kyle advises retirement plans, trustees, employee organizations and employers on a wide range of employee benefits matters. She began her career with the PBGC as an attorney and then as assistant chief counsel in large-exposure litigation and Chapter 11 bankruptcy cases, according to the White House. She then served as staff director in the office of policy and external affairs and as acting deputy chief of negotiations and restructuring where she helped lead the PBGC’s single and multiemployer insurance programs, the White House said in July.
She also helped craft the Treasury Department’s program regulations and processes under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act and served as tax counsel for the House Ways and Means Committee.
Trump, who nominated Hartogensis to lead the PBGC during his first term, will now get to pick the agency’s next director.
That new person will take charge of the PBGC as it continues work on its Special Financial Assistance Program, which was created by the American Rescue Plan Act that Democrats passed in 2021 and is designed to shore up struggling multiemployer pension plans through 2051. To date, the PBGC has approved about $69.5 billion in SFA funds to plans that cover more than 1.2 million workers, retirees and beneficiaries.
Congressional Republicans have criticized the SFA Program’s implementation over the years. Specifically, the Teamsters Central States, Southeast & Southwest Areas Pension Fund, Chicago, in April had to return a $127 million SFA overpayment it had received. The pension fund, which had $42.1 billion in assets as of Sept. 30, 2023, according to Pensions & Investments data, was awarded $36 billion in SFA funds in 2022.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the top Republican on the Senate HELP Committee sent a letter in July to Biden in which he said the PBGC has been plagued by operational problems that have cost taxpayer dollars and put pension plans at alarming levels of underfunding. He urged Biden to nominate someone to lead the PBGC who “both acknowledges PBGC’s historic shortcomings and has concrete plans to solve them in a manner unafflicted by partisan politics.”
