Was myRA Misrepresented? Why the Trump Administration Killed the Program by John Sullivan, Editor-In-Chief January 10, 2019 [T ]he reason for the interview, was [Mark Iwry's] role as a principal architect and author of the myRA program, announced during President Obama's State of the Union speech in 2014, only to be discontinued in July 2017. ... Mark Iwry doesn't like certain descriptions of the now defunct, about-to-be-revived myRA program, a high-profile part of the previous administration's attempt to help Americans save. ... The Trump administration justified their decision to cancel based on low adoption and high per- account costs incurred by the government, but Iwry doesn't buy it. ... "What was reported was simply that the Trump Administration looked at the myRA a little over a year after it had launched, and there were only several tens of thousands of accounts that were funded so far," Iwry explains. ... But the myRA, he argues, was a long-term investment in national saving, a starter account designed to play out over many years and be used for a variety of purposes-not to be judged prematurely and terminated based on the first year's activity. One of those purposes was to support the aforementioned federal or state-based auto IRAs. At the time, California was about to enact its auto IRA program; the only hold-up was the need to reach agreement on the type of default investment in which participants would be placed. Rather than delay the program entirely while debating the issue, the California legislation was amended to specify that the everyone who didn't opt out would be invested in "United States Treasuries, myRAs, or similar investments" at least temporarily for up to the first three years of the program. So, a major purpose of the myRA, by 2016, was to serve as a key element of the auto-IRA programs in Oregon, Illinois and California, as requested by those states and probably other states in the future (the auto-IRA was also explicitly required to be offered as an option on state "marketplaces" under legislation signed into law in Washington and New Jersey)