WASHINGTON — The retirement savings program for federal and military personnel is preparing to more than double the number of countries represented in its investment fund that tracks international stock markets.
One of the countries to be added is China — and that’s a problem for some people.
Eight former senior military leaders have issued an open letter seeking to prevent the change, which is set to take effect in the second half of this year. The letter has rekindled a controversy that has flared several times since the Thrift Savings Plan first committed to broadening its international stock fund, called the I Fund.
The result, the letter said, will be that a portion of money in the fund will be invested in Chinese companies including “weapons manufacturers, U.S.-sanctioned entities and other malevolent enterprises of the Chinese Communist Party.”
“It is especially intolerable to those of us who have proudly served the Nation in uniform that our retirement investments will help its enemies threaten our comrades-in-arms and the country we love,” said the letter, whose signers include two former White House national security advisers, retired Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James L. Jones and retired Navy Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter.
The letter was released in coordination with the Committee on the Present Danger: China, which defines its mission as “to educate and inform American citizens and policymakers about the existential threats presented from the Peoples Republic of China under the misrule of the Chinese Communist Party.” The group, a successor to similarly named Cold War-era organizations, was reconstituted last year by Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, and others who hold hawkish views on China.
The letter was meant to draw the attention of current military leaders, Trump, Congress and TSP investors, said Frank Gaffney Jr., vice chairman of the group, in a phone interview.
Gaffney, a Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, is a political commentator and the executive chairman of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative advocacy group. He is a polarizing figure who has been accused of advancing conspiracy theories about Muslims.
“This is in microcosm an example of a problem that we’ve been raising the alarm about, that we are underwriting the threat we are now facing from China,” Gaffney said. “It just happens that this can be understood as a particular outrage because what it involves is compelling military personnel among others to invest in really dangerous companies in China.”
