Senate gives final approval to restore Social Security benefits to government workers

The Senate cleared a bill to restore full Social Security benefits for an estimated 2.1 million government workers and retirees, several of whom told The Washington Times the fix will provide them a critical financial lifeline.

The Social Security Fairness Act passed the Senate early Saturday in a 76-20 vote, a similar bipartisan margin to the 327-75 House vote last month. The legislation now heads to President Biden’s desk to be signed into law.

Opponents of the Senate-passed bill decried its cost of nearly $200 billion over 10 years and projections that it would speed up the 2035 insolvency date for the Social Security trust fund by half a year. Three Republicans offered amendments to offset the cost, but they were handily defeated. 

The federal, state and local government workers in line to get their full benefits restored say it’s not fair for lawmakers to penalize them for Washington’s failure to shore up Social Security.

“It would mean a whole lot to me because it would essentially be at least $700” more a month, Leah Guynes told The Times.

Ms. Guynes, 58, is an educational diagnostician in Uvalde, Texas, and Friday was her last day of work before she retires from a 36-year career teaching and counseling in the state’s public schools. 

While she can’t file for Social Security until she turns 62, she has been worried about the reduction in benefits she would face because she also has a government pension.

At the beginning and end of her teaching career, Ms. Guynes worked in school districts where she only paid into a public pension. But for 20 years in between, she worked for the small, rural Fort Davis Independent School District, where she paid into both Social Security and a pension.

“I haven’t paid that much into Social Security because I didn’t ever work for a high-paying school district,” Ms. Guynes said. She said her full-earned Social Security benefits would be around $1,200 a month, but had Congress not acted to address a limitation in the law, she would have only received around $500 of it.

The issue stems from the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), which reduces benefits for workers who also have government pensions. The bill that cleared the Senate repeals the WEP, as well as the Government Pension Offset (GPO), which deducts pension earnings from Social Security spousal benefits.

WEP — enacted in 1983 as part of a larger package to shore up the financing of the Social Security system — was designed to ensure that workers with public pensions do not get an extra windfall of Social Security benefits from time in which they were not paying into it. The GPO requires retirees receiving a pension to deduct two-thirds of it from any spousal Social Security benefits they would also receive.

Because of the way Social Security benefits are calculated, the provisions have caused lower-income public employees who at times also worked in the private sector and paid Social Security payroll taxes to face steeper reductions in their benefits.

“I’m just so sick and tired of scrimping and scrounging,” said Donna of Whitman, Massachusetts.

Donna, 77, who requested her last name not be published to protect her privacy, retired a decade ago after the hospital she worked at for 36 years in billing, collections and administrative roles shut down. The hospital in Quincy, Massachusetts, was owned by the city when she started working there and she paid into a public pension, but it was later sold to a private owner and she had to start paying into Social Security.

Because of the WEP, Donna only gets roughly $500 per month in Social Security benefits, which she said is about one-third of her full earned benefit amount. She receives roughly $1,400 a month from her pension, up from $800 when she first retired, but it’s not been enough to make ends meet.

“It’s totally, totally wrong, and if you want my opinion, it’s aimed against women, because women are the ones who primarily go into teaching and nursing, and we’re the ones who are left as widows when the husbands die,” she said. “So more women are put into poverty because of this. It’s ridiculous.”

Donna had to reenter the workforce a couple of years ago, taking a job helping seniors who are sometimes younger than her with shopping, cleaning and cooking. If her husband were to die, her inability to receive full spousal benefits because of GPO means she wouldn’t be able to afford the mortgage on their home.

“I’d be homeless,” she said in an interview ahead of the Senate vote. “I’m praying and praying and praying to St Jude, the Saint of miracles, that it goes through.”

Ms. Guynes also said she would likely not be able to afford to stay in her home if her husband died before her because of GPO.

Ms. Guynes, Donna and others in similar situations who had pressed their congressional representatives and senators to act said the restored benefits are a critical lifeline.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that eliminating the WEP would increase monthly benefits by an average of $360 for 2.1 million people, or 3% of all Social Security beneficiaries, by this time next year. Over the same period, repealing the GPO would increase monthly benefits for 380,000 spouses of living beneficiaries by an average of $700 and for 390,000 spouses of deceased beneficiaries by an average of $1,190.

Michelle Ready, 64, a former police officer who worked in Little Rock, Arkansas, but moved to northeast Texas after she retired, started collecting Social Security last year. She is only getting $482, a little more than half of the $882 she would be entitled to if WEP were not in place.

For nearly 20 years before she joined law enforcement, Ms. Ready held private sector jobs and paid into Social Security. She didn’t know when she went to work for the Little Rock Police Department and began paying into a public pension that would have an impact on the Social Security benefits she had already earned.

“If you paid into Social Security, you should get back whatever you were supposed to get based on the same scale for everyone,” Ms. Ready said. “It shouldn’t matter to them if I have a different pension. They don’t do that to people who have a 401(K).”

To further illustrate the point, she said, “If I put money in two different banks, it would be like one bank telling me, ‘Well, we’re not going to give you all your money back, because you have money in another bank.’”

Diane Gryglak, 67, paid into Social Security for 25 years while working as a medical assistant and medical office manager in the Chicago area. She then switched her career focus to teaching at the College of DuPage, a public community college in Illinois, where she trained others who wanted to go into medical assisting.

After 15 years in teaching where she paid into a pension, Ms. Gryglak retired in 2023 and found her earned Social Security benefits cut by $257 a month due to WEP.

“It feels a little bit like punishment for having moved jobs,” she said. “You become aware of it after you take the job. It’s not like human resources sits you down and says, by the way, this is going to happen.”

Ms. Gryglak recently moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be closer to her new grandchild. She said she doesn’t get a full pension because she didn’t work in teaching long enough, so having her full Social Security benefits restored will help her pay bills and maybe “have a better Christmas for my grandbaby.”