Controversial Trump initiative received 12,000 nearly identical comments of support, including some from dead people

The dead have (seemingly) risen to give off the appearance of wide support for one of President Donald Trump‘s policy ideas, a Bloomberg report has revealed.

Words of the dead

On August 13, the publication reported that the Department of Labor had forged comments of support for Trump’s executive order expanding Americans’ retirement investments into private equity and crypto. Of the 12,000 comments supposedly from seniors all in on the controversial measure, some were attached to names of people who had died.

One comment came from a woman named Danna Oderman. The text is remarkably robotic, reading, “As the backbone of the American economy and drivers of job creation, small businesses are always looking for more resources to operate. Democratizing 401(k) access to private markets would unlock additional capital to be invested in U.S. businesses, supercharging the economy. The proposed rule could ultimately enable small businesses to receive more capital to invest in their operations and create more jobs in local communities.”

Families of dead ‘commenters’ confused and hurt

Oderman passed away last year. Her son emailed Bloomberg, saying, “That’s not my mom. The language is nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth.”

Another woman, Lyngrid Rawlings, “wrote” a comment expressing her “enthusiasm” for steering retirement funds into “alternative” assets. Rawlings, a former educator and U.S. Foreign Service Officer, died in 2024.

“It’s deeply disrespectful and dishonoring,” her daughter told Bloomberg. “Her life was about service, and to have her name misused in this way is the antithesis of everything she lived for.”

One living “commenter,” retired Massachusetts professor Karl Giberson, discovered his name in the comments.

“Those don’t reflect my sentiments at all,” he said.

The Labor Department doesn’t seem interested in investigating

The 12,000 comments were sent between April 29 and May 5 and followed five identical templates. Almost all of the comments used the same verbiage, down to the line breaks, suggesting that most if not all of the comments were not written by the people they were attributed to.

The Labor Department declined to investigate how the nearly identical comments appeared, telling Bloomberg that the department’s “focus when reviewing a comment is on the substance of the comment and not on the identity of the commenter or the number of commenters making the same point.”

Living humans are against the proposal

Some identical comments were actually against the proposal, and were organized via the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform.

Ericka Taylor, the organization’s co-executive director, said the proposal “has the potential to really devastate the funds and investments of regular folks. We have seen no data that anyone would benefit but private equity.”