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Northrop Grumman 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options

Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? Essentially all of the $500m in the Northrop Grumman plan votes in secret. Fidelity 500 Index Fund, the most common fund in the plans we track, publishes every vote: answer 3 of its ballots, then see your result.

The question on the ballot

As filed

The Northrop Grumman 401(k) holds $500m. Of the $500m we could identify from the plan’s own filing, every dollar sits in a fund that publishes no record of how it voted your shares — collective trusts, which unlike a mutual fund file no Form N-PX and leave no public trace of a single vote.

SourceNorthrop Grumman’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing

What the plan holdsVehicleVoting recordValue
Northrop Grumman Defined Contribution Plans Master Trustlisted as “Participation in Northrop Grumman Defined Contribution Plans Master Trust Savings Account **” Collective trust or separate account NONE $325m
Northrop Grumman Defined Contribution Plans Master Trustlisted as “Participation in Northrop Grumman Defined Contribution Plans Master Trust Retirement Account” Collective trust or separate account NONE $174m
Plan Participantslisted as “Participant loans (maturing from 2026 to 2030 at interest rates ranging from 4.25 percent to 9.5 percent) **” Participant loans No shares to vote $427,000
State Street Bank and Trust Companylisted as “State Street Bank and Trust Company short-term investment fund **” Collective trust or separate account NONE $85,000

The 4 largest holdings in the plan. “Vehicle” is the description the filing itself gives each investment.

Why there is nothing to show

A mutual fund has to file Form N-PX every year listing every vote it cast on your behalf. A collective investment trust does not. It is a bank-run vehicle sold only inside retirement plans, it is cheaper, and it is now where most 401(k) default money sits — including most target-date funds, which is where savers who never chose anything are put.

So the shares bought with Northrop Grumman employees’ retirement savings are voted every proxy season — on executive pay, on board seats, on climate and workforce proposals — and there is no public document anywhere recording how. This is not an oversight by Northrop Grumman; it is what the disclosure rules currently require, which is to say: nothing.

What you can do

Check whether your plan offers any registered fund as an alternative — those publish their records, and you can read them here. If it does not, the menu itself is the thing that has to change, and that is a decision made by the plan’s fiduciary committee, not by you alone.

See how funds that do publish voted →

CoverageWe classified 100% of this plan’s assets from the filing. The figure above is the share of the money we could classify; anything we could not identify is excluded from it rather than assumed either way.

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The largest employer plans on the site, and a few more. Each page shows what the plan’s funds did with the shares its savers paid for.

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