Senate plans to vote on bill that would increase Social Security benefits for some pensioners

• Retirees who receive income from public pensions may have their Social Security benefits reduced.
• In November, the House of Representatives passed a bill by an overwhelming majority to nix those rules.
• Now, the Senate has just days left in this session of Congress to vote on the proposal.

Last month, Congress moved to take rare bipartisan action to change certain Social Security rules.

The House of Representatives on Nov. 12 passed the Social Security Fairness Act by an overwhelming 327 to 75 majority.

The proposal would eliminate rules that reduce Social Security benefits for those who also receive income from public pensions, roughly around 2.8 million people.

For supporters of the bill, that legislative victory has been followed by a suspenseful wait. The Senate must also pass the proposal for it to become law. And the number of legislative days left in this session of Congress are quickly running out.

At a Wednesday rally on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, promised to put the bill up for a vote.

"I am here to tell you the Senate is going to take action," Schumer said, prompting cheers from the crowd including fire fighters, police, postal workers, teachers and other government employees, who stood outside the Capitol building in the rain.

"I got all my Democrats lined up to support it," said Schumer, adding they need 15 Republicans.

"What's happening to you is unfair, un-American," Schumer said. "I will fight it all the way."

Bette Marafino, an 86-year-old retired teacher and a member of a national grassroots task force that has pushed to have the rules eliminated, was at the Capitol when the House voted in November.

The vote prompted cheers that turned into tears of joy from the small group of advocates who witnessed it. "We were so happy," Marafino said.

Now, she is worried what may happen if the Senate does not pass the bill by Dec. 20.

"It's going to be start all over again, and we'll need to have some champions," Marafino said, now that Reps. Garret Graves, R-La., and Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., who co-led the bill, are leaving Congress.

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Prospect of nixing rules prompts fierce debate

Despite the enthusiasm from advocates behind the bill, many experts on both the left and right have said the Social Security Fairness Act is not the best policy.

The rules the bill would eliminate — the Windfall Elimination Provision, or WEP, and the Government Pension Offset, or GPO — were designed to make it so all Social Security beneficiaries received a comparable reimbursement for their contributions to the program.

Social Security is progressive, which means workers with lower lifetime earnings receive higher income replacement rates.

Without the rules, workers who are eligible for Social Security retirement benefits — and who also have income from pensions where they didn't pay taxes into the program — may receive a higher income replacement than some workers who contributed to the program for their entire careers, experts argue.  

The bill also does not include a way to offset the cost of the benefit increases it includes.

Over 10 years, it would cost around $196 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That's as the program currently has just nine years before the trust fund it relies on to help pay retirement benefits may be depleted.

"As far as I know, there are no policy experts who support repealing the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset," said Emerson Sprick, associate director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The WEP affects about 2.1 million Social Security beneficiaries — or about 3% of all Social Security beneficiaries — who see their retirement or disability benefit checks reduced because they also receive pension benefits from jobs not covered by Social Security.

The GPO affects almost 746,000 individuals — about 1% of all Social Security beneficiaries — by reducing spousal or widow(er) benefits because of pensions from non-covered government employment.

Rather than eliminate the rules altogether, some experts have suggested it would make more sense to replace them with more precise formulas for adjusting benefits.

Yet groups like the International Association of Fire Fighters maintain eliminating the rules altogether is the best policy.

The starting salary for a firefighter in Louisiana is around $40,000, said Edward Kelly, general president of IAFF. To make ends meet, those professionals often take on second or third jobs, where they do pay Social Security payroll taxes. Yet once they become eligible for the program's benefits, they have that income reduced.

Generally, workers who pay in the same amount as non-public employees can see their monthly benefits reduced by $500 or $600, Kelly said.

"That's devastating and it's patently unfair," Kelly said. "You're basically being discriminated against for your public service."

Public workers say Social Security cuts hurt

For many public workers, the reduction of their Social Security benefits comes as a surprise.

Roger Boudreau, a 75-year-old former teacher who is on the executive board of the Alliance for Retired Americans, regularly received Social Security's annual benefit statements with estimates of how much monthly income he may expect.

However, those disclosures did not include any information on the WEP or GPO penalties, he said.

Boudreau didn't realize how much his monthly checks would be reduced until he went to sign up for his Social Security benefits 10 years ago.

It was a shock to find out his Social Security benefits would be cut by 40%, Boudreau said. He estimates has resulted in a loss of about $5,000 per year over the past decade.

Other public workers are forced to delay their retirements because of the way the rules affect them, according to Lois Carson, 64, president of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees, an affiliate of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees.

Carson, who has been a Columbus City School employee for about 37 years, has delayed her own retirement since the rules limit the Social Security survivor benefits she would receive while collecting a pension.

"Most women work longer, because they can draw their husband's Social Security while they're working," Carson said. "But once they retire, it drops down to a third."

If the bill is not passed, most of the 30,000 members she represents will go way beyond their 30 years of employment, she said.

Advocacy groups have been working tirelessly to get lawmakers to move the bill.

Since the proposal passed in the House in November, Kelly said the firefighters alone have sent around 29,000 emails urging Senate leaders to pass the bill.

The stakes are high, experts say.

The initiative must compete with the Senate's other legislative priorities. If the bill doesn't get passed in this Congress, it dies, Kelly said.

With 62 Senate co-sponsors, the bill has a strong chance of passing once it is brought up for a vote.

"If it gets to a final vote under standard Senate procedure, I don't see a whole lot of opportunity for it to fail," Sprick said. "The question is whether it gets to that final vote."