As Congress was rending itself over the government funding deadline, and the entire political press was focused on the spectacle of it, lawmakers passed a different bill that communicates the fundamental unseriousness with which our elected leaders approach government spending.
The Social Security Fairness Act checks all the boxes of bad legislation: innocent-sounding name, bipartisan support, backed by government unions, unfunded increase in spending, and passed in a lame-duck session right before Christmas.
The bill repeals two amendments to the Social Security Act that sought to prevent windfall benefits for government employees with pensions. Their income is excluded from Social Security taxes since they receive government pensions, but when it comes time to calculate retirement benefits, their incomes look much lower than they actually were. Because Social Security benefits are supposed to be progressive, they then receive excessive Social Security payments on top of their government pensions.
Congress made the two amendments to address this issue more than 40 years ago, when data quality was much lower than it is today. There’s a case for reforming them to better match modern data, and Representative Jodey Arrington (R., Texas) introduced a bill to do that, at a ten-year cost of $24 billion.
Instead, Congress has passed the Social Security Fairness Act to repeal the amendments entirely, reverting to the same windfall benefits problem. That will cost almost ten times as much as Arrington’s bill, nearly $200 billion over ten years. And it will bring the insolvency date for the Social Security trust fund, currently in 2033, six months closer, at which point beneficiaries will receive an automatic benefits cut of about 25 percent under current law.
It’s bad enough that both parties have promised to not address the country’s entitlements problem. They don’t have to also work together to make it worse. But while everyone was obsessing over Elon Musk’s posts about continuing resolutions, that’s exactly what happened. In the House, 191 Democrats and 136 Republicans voted for the Social Security Fairness Act. In the Senate, 46 Democrats and 24 Republicans voted to advance the bill, with final passage and the president’s signature all but certain.
Entitlements spending happens on autopilot, outside the normal appropriations process that consumes so much of Congress’s energy. Members aren’t voting on it annually, and when they get a one-off chance to cast a vote, such as on the Social Security Fairness Act, they stumble over each other to be the first to say how much they love Social Security and want to expand it.
We wish the best to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Because we want to see it succeed, we’re disappointed that Musk, whose enmity for government employees is palpable, and Trump, whose support for the DOGE has been strong, didn’t exert effort to stop this bill giving away more money to retired government employees. It’s hard to envision Republicans who can’t even be counted on to oppose this bill overseeing mass dismissals of government employees next year.
While the teachers’ unions, the postal unions, and the bureaucrats’ unions thank their lobbyists for a job well done extracting even more money from taxpayers, Congress can go on Christmas break knowing it made an already bad problem even worse. And that’s before even taking into account the government-funding package.
This is Washington as usual. This is how you get $36 trillion in debt and add another trillion roughly every six months. And there are few signs of it changing at all as the entitlements doomsday clock approaches zero.