Retired Public Servants Detail WEP, GPO Hardships, Urge Action
At a field hearing in Louisiana, government retirees including members of law enforcement told members of Congress how the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO) are reducing their Social Security benefits and making retirement financially difficult.
The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security held the hearing at a firehouse in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as the push to pass the Social Security Fairness Act of 2023 (H.R. 82/S. 597) continues.
The bill, which has more than 300 cosponsors in the House and 49 in the Senate, would repeal WEP and GPO. WEP reduces benefits for retirees who earned a pension from an employer who did not withhold Social Security taxes and worked a separate job that paid into Social Security. GPO reduces spousal benefits if the retiree worked in a job not covered by Social Security. Many of those affected are public servants including law enforcement, firefighters, educators, postal workers, and others.
While the initial intent of WEP and GPO was to prevent windfalls, Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Mike Carey (R-OH) called the formulas that the government uses to reduce benefits flawed and complex with a tendency to overcorrect. Representative Carey said the hearing “is the first step to identify meaningful relief for our public servants.”
First-Hand Accounts
Witnesses included retired Shreveport, Louisiana, firefighter Bernie Piro, who told members he expects a 60 percent cut in his Social Security benefits due to WEP. He said WEP is a tremendous hardship and forced his family to eliminate spending where they can, including dropping internet service.
Piro said he felt like he wasn’t informed by the Social Security Administration (SSA) until it was too late.
“If you’re not made aware of this, the impact, it can be a detriment on how you select your retirement and what benefits you’re going to leave your spouse,” said Piro.
Also testifying was National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) President Patrick Yoes. Yoes echoed Piro’s comments that workers are not properly informed about the impact of the provisions.
“It wasn’t until later on in my career, I realized that the Windfall Elimination Provision, Government Pension Offset was going to be something that was going to drastically impact my retirement,” testified Yoes. “I think most of us had the disbelief that the government would not do that to us. Government protects us. The whole system was built on fairness, and there’s nothing fair about this at all.”
Yoes also warned that WEP and GPO could impact recruiting efforts for law enforcement and that police officers are “not asking for handouts—they’re asking for what they earned.”
The hearing was held in the district of Representative Garret Graves (R-LA), one of the sponsors of the Social Security Fairness Act.
In a statement, Rep. Graves and co-sponsor Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), expressed their hope that the hearing will spur passage.
“We commend the House Ways and Means Committee for prioritizing this simple issue of fairness, hearing directly from Americans affected by these unfair provisions, and shedding more light on the impacts on retired police officers, educators, firefighters, and public employees. But a hearing alone will not connect Americans who devoted much of their careers to public service with the benefits they earned,” they wrote.