There’s a good way of looking at this and a bad way.
The good way is pretty simple: I’ve noticed that quite a few company 401K investment programs are forced into high-load funds. That’s not very fiduciary—in fact, it’s a ripoff. The high fees are charged because the company just wants to get all of the legal bullshit off of their backs and hires a company to do that. Often, they will find high-fee fund families to pad their bottom line.
The bad way: well, it’s Obama. Anything can be redefined in the government’s favor. Private pension funds are a huge attraction for the government, because, as Willie Sutton said about banks, that’s where the money is.. or at least a good pile of it.
There’s nothing immediate in fiduciary language which would force a 401K into government securities, although some in the Obama camp would like to force that. It’s a kind of financial repression that other countries have used from time to time. The “justification” is that funds invested in bonds won’t drop as much during market downturns, but there’s virtually no protection in them against inflation, and little growth potential.
I remember looking at Weisenberger Investment Results in the early 1980's and noticing that bond funds' payouts in yield had been fully funded by falls in the price of the underlying shares. So if a bond fund paid out 30% of the principal amount over four years, say, that was balanced by a 30% reduction in principal. The bondholders and fund investors had been eating their principal, and paying income taxes on top of that for the privilege.
Bond funds were a terrible deal during the Paul Volcker interest-rate runup in 1981-1984. They'd already suffered from inflation worries in 1977-81 (Jimmy Carter's administration..... And by the way, the inflation was deliberate; it was a called play by Jimmuh, who asked the Fed to print a whole pile of funny money to save the economies of Third World nations from the oil sheikhs), losing about 1/3 of their value. For several years, bonds stank. Bonds are not "safe" investments when governments pull crap like Obama has in mind.
Guaranteed Income Contracts and fixed annuities, even worse.