An investigation has uncovered how one of President Donald Trump’s top priorities was made to look more popular by getting an artificial boost from people who had died.
More than 12,000 comments submitted to the Department of Labor in support of a plan that would fulfill Trump’s executive order expanding Americans’ retirement investments into private equity and crypto appear to have been manufactured to create the illusion of grassroots support, according to a Bloomberg report.
The submissions were devoid of personal details, such as signatures, and showed little variation in language, according to Bloomberg. Nor did they include a city, state, or email address, information included in nearly all 30,000 comments opposing the plan.
Most damning of all, some of the supposed supporters of the Trump-backed measure were no longer alive.
“That’s not my mom,” Heath Oderman told Bloomberg, after learning that a comment had been submitted under his mother’s name, Danna Oderman, in May.
Danna, who died last December, had supposedly written, “Democratizing 401(k) access to private markets would unlock additional capital to be invested in U.S. businesses, supercharging the economy.”
“The language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth,” Heath said.
Bloomberg found no evidence that anyone else shared Danna’s name after conducting a nationwide search of public records.
In another submission in May, Lyngrid Rawlings supposedly voiced support for the plan to steer more Americans’ retirement plans invested in private equity and other “alternative” assets.
But Lyngrid died in 2024 after a career as an educator and U.S. Foreign Service Officer, her daughter Lauren Rawlings told Bloomberg.
“It’s deeply disrespectful and dishonoring,” Lauren said. “Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for.”
The scheme apparently wasn’t limited to borrowing names of dead people.
Karl Giberson, a retired Massachusetts professor with an extensive publishing record, had his name attached to a supportive comment. “Those don’t reflect my sentiments, at all,” he told Bloomberg.
The 12,000 comments supporting the measure all followed five different templates and were submitted in nearly identical daily tallies from April 29 to May 5, until they abruptly stopped.
The only obvious difference among the comments following the five templates was the name. Everything else, from punctuation and line breaks to length, was suspiciously identical.
One of the templates, the one used in the case of “Danna Oderman,” praises the benefits of “democratizing” access to private markets. Another spoke in the voice of a retiree endorsing the Trump administration’s effort to “modernize” 401(k) plans. And one template began with, “Thank you, President Trump,” every time.
Private equity firms have been pushing hard for the measure, which could open the door to managing more of the roughly $10 trillion sitting in workers’ 401(k) accounts. But signs that the campaign supporting the change was manufactured suggest it has only a small pool of genuine support in the comments.
Trump has spent years railing against supposed votes cast by dead people, as he promoted a series of conspiracy theories about the integrity of the 2020 election that have been repeatedly debunked.
The White House and the Labor Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Daily Beast also reached out to the General Services Administration, which runs the website for public submissions on proposals, for comment.
