Legislation to repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset is nearing the finish line in the House.
Just over a week after it was filed, a discharge petition for the Social Security Fairness Act has reached the 218-signature threshold needed to force the bill to a floor vote.
Thirteen House lawmakers added their signatures to the petition on Thursday, after Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Garret Graves (R-Pa.) gathered advocates outside the Capitol building to urge their colleagues to push their legislation forward. …
Don’t get excited. This has no hope of passage in the Senate in this Congress.
7 comments:
Good. These provisions are in place for very good reasons. Is there an estimate of the cost involved in elimination of the offsets? It must be tremendous. And I am a GPO offset person.
These legislators have time to repeal WEP and GPO but properly funding and strengthening SSA is a step too far? This is a clear example of motivated federal employees pushing legislation that benefits a small percentage of retired federal employees.
Beneficiaries affected by the GPO had an average monthly non-covered pension of $2,690, which was nearly $865 more than the average Social Security retired worker benefit of $1,825 in 2022.
Spot on. However, it is election season, so any and all meaningless measures have hope of swaying the marginally informed voter.
Fund the operations of the agency and ensure the future of the trust fund. It's not hard.
Uhh, the prime mover of this was state and local employees (and their survivors) whose governmental employer declined to join the social security system. As of 2021, about 5.9 million state and local government employees, or 27%, did not have Social Security coverage through their government employment. The majority of these employees work at the local level, and most are police officers, firefighters, and teachers. A number far larger than old school CSRS federal employees covered by these provisions.
@9:26 Estimate is $196 billion over 10 years, so assuming that rate would be pretty consistent, it's about $20 billion a year. Then again, pensions as a concept are dying so I imagine the costs of eliminating (or savings of maintaining) the GPO has been and would continue to decrease over time. As to WEP, that's largely due to someone having tax exempt employment, so usually state/local public employees. That's probably pretty consistent cost/savings-wise.
@1052 WEP and GPO don't apply to survivors.
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