As a retirement crisis looms, helping more workers save their own money for old age is just about the least Washington can do. But even that’s too much for President Trump and his allies in Congress, who’d rather cozy up to the financial sector than deal with the economic anxiety that helped get Trump elected.

Last week, the Senate voted to roll back an Obama administration rule that helps states establish automatic IRA systems for workers whose employers don’t offer retirement plans. Trump is expected to sign the repeal, just as he signed a measure to derail similar efforts by big cities.

State-based IRA systems — which set up individual retirement accounts for workers at companies without retirement plans, and then collect regular contributions — are already underway in California and several other states. Proposed legislation on Beacon Hill would create such a system in Massachusetts, too. These plans offer a modest answer to a serious problem: Americans aren’t saving enough for old age.

According to Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research, the share of workers in their 30s with traditional pensions declined from a third in 1989 to 11 percent in 2013. Indeed, 57 percent of 30-something workers aren’t taking part in any retirement plan at all. Today’s dominant retirement vehicle is the 401(k), which, according to even its creators, was never meant to replace traditional pensions.

Over time, lawmakers and employers have created a culture in which Americans are expected to shoulder retirement risk for themselves — but lack the tools to do so properly.

There used to be a vibrant conservative policy establishment, whose think tanks and journals acknowledged the existence of social problems that the private market alone couldn’t fix. Adding a universal system of individual accounts to Social Security was George W. Bush’s unfulfilled dream. The concept of automatic IRAs, like the individual health-insurance mandate that undergirds Romneycare and Obamacare, originally came out of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Washington’s current crop of Republicans isn’t interested in such wonkery, especially when the financial sector lines up against it. For mutual-fund companies such as Fidelity and Vanguard, a new public option in the retirement-planning business could present new business opportunities — but also create new competitive pressures. The US Chamber of Commerce insists that it would be better if more employers just set up 401(k) plans.

OK, but they haven’t. Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good?

In public, Trump is keeping up his charade of supporting working people in tough times. “For too long,’’ Trump said late last month in a radio address about trade, “American workers were forgotten by their government, and I mean totally forgotten.’’

Unfortunately, Trump’s big, garish moves of late — firing the FBI chief who was probing his Russia ties, working to blow up Obamacare with little regard to what replaces it — aren’t just troublesome on their own terms; they’re also distracting attention from subtler ways in which he and his allies in Congress are undercutting American workers’ economic interest.

If Americans could only hear it over the daily Trump show, the basic message would sound like this: Not only are you on your own, but we’ll slap down anyone else in government who even tries to help you.

Dante Ramos can be reached at dante.ramos@globe.com. Follow him on Facebook: facebook.com/danteramos or on Twitter: @danteramos.