Only depends on Senate: Social Security benefits could be expanded to these new beneficiaries
Passage of the Social Security Fairness Act is now up to the Senate, but time is running out to expand benefits for nearly 3 million American retirees.
The Senate has until December 31st to take action to pass legislation that would eliminate provisions to Social Security which reduce the benefit amount that retirees, their spouses and survivors receive. If the bill doesn’t get through the upper chamber in the next six weeks, the bill will have to go through the whole process once again.
That’s because the 118th Congress will adjourn for good at the end of the year and the 119th will be sworn in next. None of the lawmakers that introduced the bill, decades in the making, will be returning next year, either because they were voted out or decided not to run for re-election.
There is a ray of hope as the bill has bipartisan backing. In the House of Representatives, it passed with a vote of 327 to 75, despite an attempt by two members of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus to derail it. In the upper chamber, 62 senators have signed on to the bill, enough to defeat a filibuster, but it needs to be brought up for a vote first.
What is the Social Security Fairness Act and who would it affect?
The Social Security Fairness Act of 2023, also known as H.R. 82, would eliminate the government pension offset (GPO) and the windfall elimination provision (WEP). These provisions reduce the amount that reitrees, or their surviving spouses and family members can receive from Social Security affecting roughly 800,000 and 2 million, respectively, beneficiaries.
WEP adjusts the amount a Social Security benefit for people who have less than 30 years of significant earnings from employment covered by Social Security and who also receive a “non-covered pension.” These are pensions that are “paid by an employer that does not withhold Social Security taxes from your salary, typically, state and local governments or non-U.S. employers.”
GPO on the other hand “reduces the spousal or widow(er) benefit by two-thirds of the monthly non-covered pension,” says the Social Security Administration. Of the 5.84 million spousal or widow(er) beneficiaries in 2022, the GPO applied to roughly 12.6% of them. Approximately 70% of those affected had their entire benefit offset by the GPO.
The bill would add around $196 billion to the federal deficit over a decade according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It would accelerate the depletion of the Social Security Trust Fund by about six months informed the nonpartisan CBO.
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