RELEASE: Coalition Launches Campaign to Sound an Alarm About Federal Employees’ Savings Underwriting the C.C.P.

NEWS RELEASE

For Immediate Release
May 23, 2022

CONTACTS:
Hamilton Strategies, [email protected],
Beth Harrison, 610.584.1096, ext. 105,
or Deborah Hamilton, ext. 102

Coalition Launches Campaign to Sound an Alarm About Federal Employees’ Savings Underwriting the C.C.P.
Mobile Billboard, Social Media Ads in Advance of TSP Board Meeting Tuesday

WASHINGTON, D.C.— The Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC) is contributing today to the efforts of an informal coalition opposing a renewed gambit by the federal Thrift Savings Plan’s lead manager, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, and the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB) aimed at inducing military and civilian government employees to invest – many of them unwittingly – in companies owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The CPDC will sponsor a mobile billboard urging “No TSP for CCP” that will be visiting such sites as the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, the Veterans Affairs Department, the Office of Personnel Management and the FRTIB headquarters over the next two days.

The coalition will also place social media advertisements to ensure that, despite a serious lack of transparency on the part of the TSP management, Plan participants are made aware that – all other things being equal – their investments via a “Mutual Fund Window” opening next month will likely result in them putting their retirement savings into Chinese companies, some of them sanctioned by the U.S. government for arming the People’s Liberation Army or complicity in human rights abuses. In fact, such companies may well be listed in the Annex to President Biden’s Executive Order 14032 dated  June 7, 2021, which characterized them as “unusual and extraordinary threats…to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States” and prohibited the purchase and sale of their publicly traded securities – strengthening a similar Executive Order 13959 issued by President Trump on November 12, 2020.

The Committee on the Present Danger: China wrote the FRTIB on 18 April 2022 raising a series of questions about this problematic initiative and urging answers to others posed by Senators Marco Rubio, Tommy Tuberville and Tom Cotton. To date, the Committee has not received a response.

Consequently, CPDC Chairman Brian Kennedy wrote the TSP board again today, calling for these questions to be answered in the course of a public meeting of the FRTIB at 10:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, 24 May 2022. A failure to do so by the Board would be tantamount to U.S. government endorsement and legitimization of not only federal TSP participants, but American investors more generally, underwriting our mortal enemy: the Chinese Communist Party. That must not happen.

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CONTACTS:

To interview representatives of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, contact [email protected], Beth Harrison, 610.584.1096, ext. 105, or Deborah Hamilton, ext. 102.

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