Social Security reforms face uncertain future in Senate

A House-passed bill to reform aspects of Social Security is lingering in the Senate as questions bubble up over its path forward.

The House approved the bill — which would do away with rules backers say have led to unfair reductions in benefits for some who have worked in public service — by a wide margin earlier this month. But some are concerned about the measure’s chances in the Senate as lawmakers face a ticking clock before a new Congress is ushered in.

“There's been some talk about trying to make it part of the end-of-the-year negotiation. I think that's, I think that's really an effort to kill it,” outgoing Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who co-authored the bill, said before Congress left town for Thanksgiving recess.

Graves expressed confidence that the bill, which passed with nearly 300 votes in the House, has the support in the Senate to pass as a stand-alone bill. But he added that “anything else is really putting us on a slow path toward death — and I think it's intentional.”

If passed, the bill, known as the Social Security Fairness Act, would repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO).

Experts say the tax rules are aimed at preventing people who have worked much of their careers in public service from collecting both their pensions and relatively higher Social Security payouts. The GPO also leads to reductions in benefits for the spouses that receive government pensions.

But cases where the policies have led to over- or undercorrections for beneficiaries have helped fuel calls for reforms or a complete overhaul of the measures.

Graves — along with Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) — penned a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)  and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last week urging swift floor consideration for the legislation. 

“For the first time in history, you have the opportunity to bring this bill across the finish line,” they wrote. “We urge you, on behalf of the nearly 2.5 million retirees impacted by WEP and GPO in every state across the nation, to bring the Social Security Fairness Act (H.R.82) before the U.S. Senate for a vote.”

The Hill has reached out to the offices of Schumer and McConnell for comment. 

The letter came on the heels of the measure’s passage in the House. But it didn’t happen without a bit of drama.

Despite the bill’s broad bipartisan support, some Republicans took issue with the strategy deployed by backers to push the bill through the lower chamber. 

The maneuver, also known as a discharge petition, allows members to bypass leadership to force consideration of legislation. While it’s not uncommon for members of the minority party to attempt a discharge petition, it’s rarely successful as the 218-signature threshold requires members of the majority party to buck their own leaders.

“In a well-run Congress, no legislator signs a discharge petition if you’re a majority. That is a rule that is never broken,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said back in September. “And the fact that 47 of my colleagues signed a discharge petition shows that we have an utter lack of discipline.”

The bill also came into the spotlight briefly before Congress returned from recess earlier this month, when members of the House Freedom Caucus attempted to block the measure.

Adding to some of the GOP frustration around the strategy used to allow consideration for the bill, some conservatives have also raised alarm over the projected cost of the bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimated earlier this year that the bill could cost upward of $190 billion over a decade.

Multiple experts have said fixes are needed for the rules, but they have additionally cautioned against eliminating WEP and GPO, while also raising questions of fairness.

“They were devised at a time when the government didn’t have kind of all the data it could get today, so they had to have these sort of crude rules to do it,” Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Hill earlier this year. “And so, on average, it’s about correct, meaning, on average, people are being treated more or less fairly. But it doesn’t necessarily work fairly in every case.”

But, he added, “if you have some people who are being treated unfairly, just law of averages means you’ve got other people who are getting a better deal than they should be getting.”

“The solution to that is fix the formula,” he argued, not eliminate the rules entirely.

There is bipartisan support on the Senate side in doing away with the provisions. But its next steps are unclear. 

Also asked about expectations of passage for the bill, Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of more than 60 senators co-sponsoring the legislation in the upper chamber, said: “We'll see.”

“Republicans, I think there's still an open question about whether they want to do anything more than have a [continuing resolution] and leave town, but we'll see,” he added.

Congress currently has until Dec. 20 to pass legislation to keep the government open or risk a shutdown. 

Lawmakers on both sides are expecting Congress to pass a short-term stopgap, also known as a continuing resolution, into early next year to stave off a funding lapse during the holiday season. But they face a tight schedule and several pressing items to check off before the end of the year.

“I've got an extensive list of priorities,” Wyden told The Hill, adding there “a lot of things I'd like to get done, and I think are in the public interest that are bipartisan.”