Buried inside a 1974 federal law is a discount rate calculation that most elected officials have never read — and it's quietly determining whether millions of public workers will retire with what they were promised. This episode traces how actuarial assumptions became a mechanism of deferred political reckoning, who had the authority to fix the math and chose not to, and what happens when a government's most credible promise turns out to be arithmetic held together with optimism. Last episode we watched a federal judge take the wheel from a police superintendent; this time, the power belongs to someone you've never heard of and can't vote out.