A bill to repeal the decades-long Social Security penalty for teachers, police and other government retirees won final passage Friday evening after the Senate voted overwhelmingly to give nearly 3 million Americans and more than 90,000 Louisiana residents their full benefits. grant.
The Social Security Fairness Act by Louisiana Republican Congressman Garrett Graves and Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia will now head to President Biden’s desk, where he is expected to sign the bill into law.
“Today is a day to celebrate,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said in a statement to USA Today Network. “State and local workers in Louisiana deserve the full Social Security benefits they have earned. Now they will get it.
“This was a much overdue step. Now we must save Social Security from insolvency for every American within nine years.”
The 1980s windfall elimination penalty and government pension offset prevent approximately 2.8 million government retirees across the country who earned pensions from those careers from collecting their full Social Security benefits earned while working outside the government.
In many cases, their benefits are reduced by hundreds of dollars every month.
Opponents of the effort to eliminate the WEP and GPO restrictions argued that repealing the current law would increase pressure already on Social Security and its future viability.
The Social Security Board of Trustees has said that Social Security will go bankrupt by 2035. Repealing WEP and GPO will cost approximately $200 billion over the next decade and accelerate insolvency by approximately six months.
“It will take another 10 years for Social Security to fail,” Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said during a procedural vote earlier this week. “This bill would take $200 billion out of the Social Security Trust Fund without offsetting any payments to it. It pushes back the insolvency by six months.”
More: The Senate is planning a vote on a bill to end welfare penalties for teachers and police
Greg Hilburn covers Louisiana state politics for the USA TODAY Network. Follow him on Twitter @GregHilburn1.
This article originally appeared on Shreveport Times: Senate passes bill to repeal welfare penalties for teachers, police
