Investment advisers are allowed to give you bad advice. The House wants to keep it that way.

If the House of Representatives gets its way, President Barack Obama won’t be able to crack down on unnecessary fees that cost Americans billions of dollars in retirement savings a year.

The House voted 234 to 188 Thursday to undo a rule proposed by the Labor Department earlier this month that would require anyone getting paid to provide retirement investment advice to act in the best interest of retirees. Many people think that’s already how things work, but it isn’t.

The way things work right now is that brokers who oversee retirement savings accounts can be paid extra to steer their clients into unnecessarily expensive funds or excessively risky investments, without disclosing that fact to their clients. That sort of conflicted investment advice costs Americans saving for retirement $17 billion a year, according to…