Biden Signs Social Security Fairness Act Into Law

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act into law on Sunday, ensuring that millions of Americans will begin seeing larger monthly Social Security payments.

“The bill I’m signing today is about a simple proposition: Americans who have worked hard all their lives to earn an honest living should be able to retire with economic security and dignity,” Biden said shortly after being escorted into the East Room of the White House by Bette Marafino, president of the Connecticut Alliance for Retired Americans.

“The law that existed denied millions of Americans access to the full Social Security benefits they earned by thousands of dollars a year,” the president said.

The bill Biden signed into law specifically repealed the windfall elimination provision and the government pension offset, provisions in the law that reduced social security benefits for Americans who also receive a pension for work on which they did not pay Social Security taxes.

That group includes about 2.8 million public sector employees, including police officers, firefighters, teachers and members of the federal government workforce, as well as their surviving spouses and family members.

Biden said that as a result of the measure, beneficiaries will see an average increase of $360 in their monthly payments.

“That’s a big deal in middle-class households like the one I grew up in and many of you did,” he said.

And because the payments will be retroactive as of January 2024, beneficiaries affected by the new measure will receive thousands of dollars to cover for the past year.

Proposals to remove the windfall elimination provision and the government pension offset have been reintroduced repeatedly in Congress, but never received a vote in either chamber until this past year.

It finally advanced to a vote in the House in November after Reps. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., and Garret Graves, R-La., filed a bipartisan discharge petition to get it there.

With that, the House quickly took up the Social Security Fairness Act and passed it by a 327-75 vote.

The Senate followed suit in December, passing the bill 76-20 and sending it on to Biden for his signature.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the new measure will cost nearly $196 billion over a decade.

Proponents of the bill have argued that it’s money well spent because it will provide equity to millions of public service employees when it comes to their retirement benefits. 

Opponents of the measure fear it will also hasten Social Security’s insolvency.

Among those in the former group was Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans.

“For years the government has taken away Social Security benefits from millions of retired federal, state and local government employees who worked as teachers, police, firefighters, postal workers and general employees,” Fiesta said in a written statement. 

“Repeal of the WEP-GPO is long-overdue and would not have happened without the tenacity of Alliance members across the country who built a grassroots coalition and passed this law with strong bipartisan support,” he said.

Marafino, who in addition to her role with the Connecticut Alliance is also co-chair of the National Alliance’s WEP-GPO Repeal Task Force, recalled her widowed maternal grandmother, who, with six children to support, “was so grateful that my grandfather’s Social Security benefit would keep her out of the poor house.” 

“I think the vivid impression of that poor house motivated me and others on our Task Force to help correct the injustice of the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset,” Marafino said. “No president has done more for older Americans than President Biden, and we are forever grateful that he signed this bill into law.”

Among the critics of the bill is Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

In a written statement issued ahead of the Senate vote on the measure, MacGuineas said it was “truly astonishing that at a time when we are just nine years away from the trust fund for the nation’s largest program being completely exhausted, lawmakers are about to consider speeding that up by six months. And add on top of that another $200 billion in new borrowing as a result. 

“We are racing to our own fiscal demise,” she said. 

“Even worse is that repealing WEP and GPO does nothing to address the windfalls they are intended to eliminate – instead, it just restores windfalls for folks who have other government pensions. What an incredulous set of events,” MacGuineas continued.

“Hastening Social Security’s insolvency will only make its consequences worse; benefits will be cut by an additional 1% while reducing lifetime benefits for a typical couple by $25,000. We should be talking about how to prevent this cut, not make it bigger and happen sooner,” she said.

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