Labor's 401(k) Crypto Rule Lands at White House Desk for Final Check

The Department of Labor has moved its 401(k) crypto rule into the White House's final-review lane. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs docket lists the rule — officially titled 'Fiduciary Duties In Selecting Designated Investment Alternatives,' identifier 1210-AC38 — as pending at the final-rule stage. OIRA picked it up from Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration on Nov. 5, 2026.

At the center of the plan is a safe harbor for the people who build a plan's investment menu. Under Labor's March 31 proposal, fiduciaries who follow a prescribed process — weighing performance, fees, liquidity, valuation, benchmarks and complexity — would get a presumption that they met their duty of prudence. Labor says the goal is to shrink the regulatory fog and lawsuit risk hanging over those calls, and the framework would cover investment-menu picks broadly, not just crypto or alternatives.

This is the latest step in a longer thaw. On May 28, 2025, Labor rescinded guidance that had told fiduciaries to take 'extreme care' before adding cryptocurrency options, saying it would neither endorse nor reject them while holding plans to ERISA's ordinary standards of care. Then came President Donald Trump's Aug. 7, 2025 executive order, which told the department to clarify fiduciary duties for asset-allocation funds holding alternatives — a definition that included actively managed vehicles investing in digital assets.

Don't pop the champagne in your 401(k) just yet. White House review doesn't change any plan's obligations and doesn't hand participants new investment options by itself. The OIRA entry doesn't include the final text either, so the published proposal isn't a preview of what the finished rule will say.

What happens next is procedural but consequential: OIRA finishes its review, then Labor publishes the final rule and spells out when its provisions take effect. Whether workers ever see a crypto fund in their plan still comes down to the fiduciaries picking the menu.