Oh, I think there is a typo at the end of the second paragraph: "...will receive vastly superior treatment from the program that workers who pay taxes into Social Security throughout their careers." "That" instead of "than?"
Good article. I just tried to find a counterpoint article now by searching for "why the Social Security Fairness Act is a good idea" and honestly couldn't find one. There are a lot of bald assertions that the WEP and the GPO are "unfair" by either advocacy groups for people who would be getting more money by their repeal or by politicians. But I can't find anyone breaking down the numbers like this article as part of an argument for _why_ they are supposedly unfair.
Basically, it comes down to, "Repealing the WEP and GPO would get me more money. Therefore, the WEP and GPO are unfair" or "I like getting votes. One way to get votes is to give people more money."
Also, I am surprised it is 2025, and a lot of people _still_ aren't aware Social Security is heading toward insolvency. This has been the projection since the 1990s. We're running out of money _and_ cutting bigger cheques for people who already have retirement income from other sources.
I've communicated with a lot of public employees about this. Most don't understand how Social Security's benefit formula and spousal rules (which usually differ from those of the government pensions they participated in) create windfalls. They just don't get it.
But once you do explain things, it basically just reverts to "I want more money." Even though the windfalls are obvious once you understand the issue, no minds are ever changed.
The Social Security “Fairness” Act will add about $200 billion to Social Security’s costs over the next 10 years and advance the trust fund depletion date by almost a year. This was the worst possible timing for such a bad idea.
It's pretty clear Congress isn't going to act to make any sort of difficult fiscal reforms of any sort.
(and forget about the messiness of Medicare)
So I've mainly been waiting to see what disaster will occur first. It looks like maybe I'll get to watch Chicago will get to implode before Social Security! Huzzah!
Good piece. Your points are well taken. One silver lining of the act I'd note is it will reduce some of the administrative complexity within Social Security, simplifying benefit computation and eliminating some of SSA's data needs. I expect overpayments arising from a lack of information on beneficiaries' noncovered pensions to cease (of course, this will happen through the payment of the windfalls you discuss).
I'm not sure why switching from a DB pension to a retirement account would matter for purposes of the WEP/GPO. The issue is that an employee has a retirement plan that acts as a substitute for Social Security and, based on federal law, must be at least as generous as Social Security. To avoid windfall Social Security payments, either these non-covered earnings or the pension benefits from non-covered jobs need to be accounted for.
I can't help wondering about your characterization of today's Congress as not knowing what they were doing. As I learned about this issue (mainly from you), I assumed that Congress cynically passed the new law to trade windfalls for votes, and they either knew it was in no way "fair" or didn't care whether it was or not.
It's hard for me to believe that today's Congress genuinely thought their predecessors originally enacted WEP/GPO out of...what?...some desire to gratuitously screw government workers? Or do they think prior Congresses went to the trouble of passing two laws not understanding what they were doing or why? I realize Hanlon's razor tells me to attribute the Fairness Act to stupidity, as you appear to, instead of malice, as I'm inclined to do. You're closer to this kind of stuff than I am, so I should defer, though I may not have it in me.
I'm also curious if Biden was in the Senate for WEP and GPO and how he voted. Against, I'd guess, though it would be fun to learn he voted for one or both.
A question: is it too late for government employers currently in Social Security to pull out going forward? Seems like that might be the value-maximizing play for their workers. They'd get windfalls for the service up to now, and could use the payroll tax they're saving to fund a replacement pension benefit. (This is the consultant in me talking.) Then the $200bn cost would turn into something much higher, even before the coming public pension bailouts. Maybe we can bankrupt Social Security before the Lions or Bills win a Super Bowl if we really try.
Thanks for writing about this. You definitely did your part.
My experience of late is that most members of Congress understand very little about how Social Security works. Say, if you asked how the basic retirement benefit is calculated or the rules for spousal/survivors benefits, I don't think they could tell you in any detail. And certainly not in the level of detail to understand why non-covered public employees receive windfalls from Social Security. The level of knowledge just ins't there, which makes them more susceptible to misleading statements or political pressure.
The WEP was part of the 1983 Amendments, which Biden did vote for.
Thanks, Andrew — it’s disappointing/frustrating/infuriating that in their ignorance they wouldn’t at least have been self-aware enough to wonder if maybe WEP/GPO were put there for a reason. I don’t know… Guess it’s water under the bridge but I’m glad you put all this on the record.
Biden was also a senator in 1977, when the GPO was enacted into law. I suspect he voted for it but didn't check. Note that members of Congress can’t be expected to know everything about every program under their purview. That’s why Congress created "committees of jurisdiction." In the case of Social Security, the House has assigned jurisdiction to the Ways and Means Committee, and the Senate has assigned it to the Finance Committee. The members of those committees are expected to become experts in their areas of responsibility, and generally, they do that. For literally decades, every time a member of Congress introduced legislation to repeal the “unfair” GPO and WEP provisions, that legislation would be assigned to the appropriate committee of jurisdiction, where it inevitably died. The real Social Security experts in Congress were not going to let these bills move forward because they were bad policy. That happened again and again, one Congress after another, until 2024, when an extraordinary discharge petition was used to ram the bill through the House, and then the Senate had too little time to give the bill proper consideration. As Andrew says, this event raises serious questions about Congress's ability to enact sensible Social Security reform legislation -- at exactly the time when it is desperately needed.
Thanks, Bruce. All the more reason this is so infuriating. Seems to me that the discharge petition demonstrates bad intent as opposed to mere ignorance, no?
Difficult to read people's minds, but it's clear that the subject-matter experts in Congress did not support this legislation, so they were bypassed by extraordinary means. This was just the seventh successful discharge petition in 50 years!!! Neither of the committees of jurisdiction for Social Security had ever held any hearings or even voted on the bill. This legislative history – or lack of it – is remarkable, to say the least. Normally, bills that pass have extensive records of committee hearings, witness testimony, cost estimates, member statements, committee votes, floor statements, etc. Almost none of that exists in this case. The use of a discharge petition to ram the bill through the House and the lack of time for proper Senate consideration led to this result.
It's remarkable. The theory I'm given by folks on Capitol Hill is that many Members considered co-sponsoring the bill a political freebie: win some affection from public employee unions for a bill that won't get out of committee. But eventually the number of co-sponsors reached critical mass, and once you've supported a bill it's really hard to unsupport it.
Mencken’s wisdom still applies: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.” Or, more famously, “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
Don't most states have a retirement fund that teachers also pay into. The way I read the examples was Teacher 1 having no state retirement but contributing to SS. If both teachers are receiving state retirement how does the math work then. Wouldn't the teacher not contributing to SS while teaching come out lower in retirement?
Teacher 1 pays into Social Security from her main teaching job. Teacher 2 instead pays into a state/local government pension plan that acts as a substitute for Social Security.
Now, nearly every public school teacher pays into a pension plan. But in most cases, these pensions are on top of Social Security, which they also pay into.
But a smaller number of teachers and other state/local governemnt employees pay into a government plan instead of Social Security. These are the people the WEP/GPO apply to.
Why would the two situations not be essentially equal. Teacher 1 has a teacher pension to supplement SS according your statement. While Teacher 2 had SS to supplement their teacher pension. Teacher 2 will have less money in SS so a lower SS benefit. I realize that state pension programs differ and every teacher could invest in a 403B as well.
As an aside. TRS distributions had not been raised in almost 20 years so it was not keeping up with cost of living. I am not sure how many of the older retired teachers were living on what they received.
I understand that. But the lack of TRS COLAs (and elsewhere) are because states didn't properly fund their pensions. I'm not trying to be heartless, but that isn't a Social Security problem.
Followup to my last post. Mr. Biggs, you may not be aware, but states are pulling away from State Pensions and in my State all new employees are required to invest in their own retirement plans. This is fair, isn't it?
Your math is incorrect sir. All things being equal in terms of teacher one and teacher two earning the same amount of pay, and assuming teachers one and two paid the exact same amount in income taxes, the difference is in extra earned pension benefits. Just like anyone else, teachers one or two could invest in a pension or 401K or gold or stocks or whatever, and the payout is money earned from that investment and has nothing to do with SOC. WTF dude.
My math isn't incorrect. People have been making the same point as I made since back in the 1970s, and no one has shown since then that the math was wrong.
So the question is why do I find that public employees can receive windfalls from Social Security?
The answer is that, unlike a state/local govt pension, Social Security is progressive. So the benefits you receive on your next dollar of earnings/contributions depends on the amount of earnings/contributions you already have. When public employees aren't covered by Social Security, they appear poor to Social Security's benefit formual because it can't "see" their non-covered earnings. That's how the windfalls happen, and the Windfall Eliminatinio Provision was introduced in 1983 to address it.
Lastly, I just have to add the highly unlikely situation where a SS-covered teacher is making the exact same income as her husband, and having the exact same AIME as him, thus eliminating any of spousal benefit never mind a Survivor benefit.
If two spouses are covered under Social Security, the spousal benefit the low-earning spouse is eligible for is reduced dollar-for-dollar by their own benefit.
Under the Government Pension Offset, the spousal benefit for a person with a non-Social Security-covered job is reduced only 67 cents on the dollar for the government pension benefit received. Even with the GPO, the public employee may receive a windfall.
With the GPO eliminated, the windfalls can be massive. This is an obvious and meaningfully large disparity, all the in the name of "fairness."
I forgot to add that FERS employees and all governmental employees who pay in SS do receive the full survivor benefit as well as their own pension, assuming the survivor benefit is greater than their own Social Security retirement benefit, which most likely it will be if the beneficiary planned correctly.
Oh, AND they can receive their survivor benefit WHILE deferring their own benefit to allow Delayed Earnings Credits to accumulate until they reach the age of 70 as well.
An additional point regarding federal employees who are covered by FERS: they pay into FERS (and the TSP) ON TOP of paying into Social Security. The non-covered employees affected by the WEP and GPO pay into a government pension INSTEAD of Social Security.
It totally makes sense to coordinate benefits between Social Security and pensions that act as a substitute for Social Security. But there isn't a need to coordinate between Social Security and pensions that operate as supplements to Social Security. It's just a different situation.
The situation that you describe is possible only if the spouse dies before the worker reaches age 70. That obviously happens sometimes but is far from the usual situation. Usually, both spouses live to age 70 and beyond. You need to work pretty hard to devise scenarios where the GPO disadvantages a beneficiary.
One thing that Andrew misses is that the average teacher salaries in Texas, Georgia and Virginia, places I'm familiar with that have teachers affected by WEP and GPO, the average salaries are much less than 72k.
So to compare a teacher in CA vs. one in TX is not an apples to apples comparison, especially when it comes to pensions.
Many teachers in these areas have quite small pensions and ones in TX, in particularly, only get boosts upon legislature consent. I don't know how COLAS work in GA and VA.
They also lose the entirety of their survivor benefit upon death of the husband too, thus leaving them with a fraction of the pension their peers in CA or NJ get. And those peers in CA and NJ also get the ENTIRETY of the survivor benefit, while receiving their public pension, even if they don't get any spousal benefit.
Of course, the GPO is a moot point if they're single. So, then they get hit with a $550 reduction in the social security benefit due to WEP. So a single teacher with say 20 years experience gets all of a $3k a year pension, if that. That extra $550 goes a LONG way towards retirement security. Oh, need I say, that many of these are MAGA voters too, as they live in the South.
Seems an easy win to reward your base with a minimal expense of $550 a month.
Teacher salaries in TX, GA and VA are below the national average, but so are other wages and the costs of living in those states. So teachers there remain middle income, not low income.
Moreover, as I noted over at Twitter, public employees in these states and elsewhere have pensions that are generally much more generous than what employers pay into 401k plans. And, in retirement, public employees -- including those who would benefit from the Social Security Fairness Act -- don't generally have below-average incomes. As the Urban Institute pointed out, most are upper income in retirement.
It may be technically possible to find examples where a public employee is made worse off from the WEP/GPO than if they had participated in Social Security like everyone else. I haven't constructed one yet, but it's possible. However, I believe the WEP and GPO in most cases reduce but don't eliminate the windfalls that public employees receive.
For instance, if you're in Social Security than any spousal benefit you're eligoble for is reduced dollar-for-dollar by your own Social Security benefit. But the GPO reduces spousal benefits by only 67 cents for each dollar of non-covered pension benefits. In the teach examples I wrote up, windfalls exist even after both the WEP and GPO are applied.
So the Social Security Fairness Act simply fails any sort of equity test and any sort of need test. I
I also have not been able to construct a situation where a public employee/retiree is made worse off by the WEP/GPO. I also believe it's possible, but obviously, the opposite situation is much more common. I explored examples where the governmental retirement plan provides very small benefits but still triggers the WEP/GPO. Those examples aren't really plausible, however, because public employees in a retirement plan that is not “comparable” to Social Security would be covered mandatorily; that provision requiring coverage was enacted into law as section 11332 of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (Public Law 101-508), effective on July 2, 1991.
Minor correction: The GPO was first enacted into law in 1977. It was amended slightly in 1983.
Oh, I think there is a typo at the end of the second paragraph: "...will receive vastly superior treatment from the program that workers who pay taxes into Social Security throughout their careers." "That" instead of "than?"
Good article. I just tried to find a counterpoint article now by searching for "why the Social Security Fairness Act is a good idea" and honestly couldn't find one. There are a lot of bald assertions that the WEP and the GPO are "unfair" by either advocacy groups for people who would be getting more money by their repeal or by politicians. But I can't find anyone breaking down the numbers like this article as part of an argument for _why_ they are supposedly unfair.
Basically, it comes down to, "Repealing the WEP and GPO would get me more money. Therefore, the WEP and GPO are unfair" or "I like getting votes. One way to get votes is to give people more money."
Also, I am surprised it is 2025, and a lot of people _still_ aren't aware Social Security is heading toward insolvency. This has been the projection since the 1990s. We're running out of money _and_ cutting bigger cheques for people who already have retirement income from other sources.
I've communicated with a lot of public employees about this. Most don't understand how Social Security's benefit formula and spousal rules (which usually differ from those of the government pensions they participated in) create windfalls. They just don't get it.
But once you do explain things, it basically just reverts to "I want more money." Even though the windfalls are obvious once you understand the issue, no minds are ever changed.
The Social Security “Fairness” Act will add about $200 billion to Social Security’s costs over the next 10 years and advance the trust fund depletion date by almost a year. This was the worst possible timing for such a bad idea.
It's pretty clear Congress isn't going to act to make any sort of difficult fiscal reforms of any sort.
(and forget about the messiness of Medicare)
So I've mainly been waiting to see what disaster will occur first. It looks like maybe I'll get to watch Chicago will get to implode before Social Security! Huzzah!
Good piece. Your points are well taken. One silver lining of the act I'd note is it will reduce some of the administrative complexity within Social Security, simplifying benefit computation and eliminating some of SSA's data needs. I expect overpayments arising from a lack of information on beneficiaries' noncovered pensions to cease (of course, this will happen through the payment of the windfalls you discuss).
I'm not sure why switching from a DB pension to a retirement account would matter for purposes of the WEP/GPO. The issue is that an employee has a retirement plan that acts as a substitute for Social Security and, based on federal law, must be at least as generous as Social Security. To avoid windfall Social Security payments, either these non-covered earnings or the pension benefits from non-covered jobs need to be accounted for.
I can't help wondering about your characterization of today's Congress as not knowing what they were doing. As I learned about this issue (mainly from you), I assumed that Congress cynically passed the new law to trade windfalls for votes, and they either knew it was in no way "fair" or didn't care whether it was or not.
It's hard for me to believe that today's Congress genuinely thought their predecessors originally enacted WEP/GPO out of...what?...some desire to gratuitously screw government workers? Or do they think prior Congresses went to the trouble of passing two laws not understanding what they were doing or why? I realize Hanlon's razor tells me to attribute the Fairness Act to stupidity, as you appear to, instead of malice, as I'm inclined to do. You're closer to this kind of stuff than I am, so I should defer, though I may not have it in me.
I'm also curious if Biden was in the Senate for WEP and GPO and how he voted. Against, I'd guess, though it would be fun to learn he voted for one or both.
A question: is it too late for government employers currently in Social Security to pull out going forward? Seems like that might be the value-maximizing play for their workers. They'd get windfalls for the service up to now, and could use the payroll tax they're saving to fund a replacement pension benefit. (This is the consultant in me talking.) Then the $200bn cost would turn into something much higher, even before the coming public pension bailouts. Maybe we can bankrupt Social Security before the Lions or Bills win a Super Bowl if we really try.
Thanks for writing about this. You definitely did your part.
Thanks, Larry.
My experience of late is that most members of Congress understand very little about how Social Security works. Say, if you asked how the basic retirement benefit is calculated or the rules for spousal/survivors benefits, I don't think they could tell you in any detail. And certainly not in the level of detail to understand why non-covered public employees receive windfalls from Social Security. The level of knowledge just ins't there, which makes them more susceptible to misleading statements or political pressure.
The WEP was part of the 1983 Amendments, which Biden did vote for.
Thanks, Andrew — it’s disappointing/frustrating/infuriating that in their ignorance they wouldn’t at least have been self-aware enough to wonder if maybe WEP/GPO were put there for a reason. I don’t know… Guess it’s water under the bridge but I’m glad you put all this on the record.
Biden was also a senator in 1977, when the GPO was enacted into law. I suspect he voted for it but didn't check. Note that members of Congress can’t be expected to know everything about every program under their purview. That’s why Congress created "committees of jurisdiction." In the case of Social Security, the House has assigned jurisdiction to the Ways and Means Committee, and the Senate has assigned it to the Finance Committee. The members of those committees are expected to become experts in their areas of responsibility, and generally, they do that. For literally decades, every time a member of Congress introduced legislation to repeal the “unfair” GPO and WEP provisions, that legislation would be assigned to the appropriate committee of jurisdiction, where it inevitably died. The real Social Security experts in Congress were not going to let these bills move forward because they were bad policy. That happened again and again, one Congress after another, until 2024, when an extraordinary discharge petition was used to ram the bill through the House, and then the Senate had too little time to give the bill proper consideration. As Andrew says, this event raises serious questions about Congress's ability to enact sensible Social Security reform legislation -- at exactly the time when it is desperately needed.
Thanks, Bruce. All the more reason this is so infuriating. Seems to me that the discharge petition demonstrates bad intent as opposed to mere ignorance, no?
Difficult to read people's minds, but it's clear that the subject-matter experts in Congress did not support this legislation, so they were bypassed by extraordinary means. This was just the seventh successful discharge petition in 50 years!!! Neither of the committees of jurisdiction for Social Security had ever held any hearings or even voted on the bill. This legislative history – or lack of it – is remarkable, to say the least. Normally, bills that pass have extensive records of committee hearings, witness testimony, cost estimates, member statements, committee votes, floor statements, etc. Almost none of that exists in this case. The use of a discharge petition to ram the bill through the House and the lack of time for proper Senate consideration led to this result.
It's remarkable. The theory I'm given by folks on Capitol Hill is that many Members considered co-sponsoring the bill a political freebie: win some affection from public employee unions for a bill that won't get out of committee. But eventually the number of co-sponsors reached critical mass, and once you've supported a bill it's really hard to unsupport it.
Mencken’s wisdom still applies: “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.” Or, more famously, “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
Don't most states have a retirement fund that teachers also pay into. The way I read the examples was Teacher 1 having no state retirement but contributing to SS. If both teachers are receiving state retirement how does the math work then. Wouldn't the teacher not contributing to SS while teaching come out lower in retirement?
Teacher 1 pays into Social Security from her main teaching job. Teacher 2 instead pays into a state/local government pension plan that acts as a substitute for Social Security.
Now, nearly every public school teacher pays into a pension plan. But in most cases, these pensions are on top of Social Security, which they also pay into.
But a smaller number of teachers and other state/local governemnt employees pay into a government plan instead of Social Security. These are the people the WEP/GPO apply to.
Why would the two situations not be essentially equal. Teacher 1 has a teacher pension to supplement SS according your statement. While Teacher 2 had SS to supplement their teacher pension. Teacher 2 will have less money in SS so a lower SS benefit. I realize that state pension programs differ and every teacher could invest in a 403B as well.
As an aside. TRS distributions had not been raised in almost 20 years so it was not keeping up with cost of living. I am not sure how many of the older retired teachers were living on what they received.
I understand that. But the lack of TRS COLAs (and elsewhere) are because states didn't properly fund their pensions. I'm not trying to be heartless, but that isn't a Social Security problem.
Followup to my last post. Mr. Biggs, you may not be aware, but states are pulling away from State Pensions and in my State all new employees are required to invest in their own retirement plans. This is fair, isn't it?
Your math is incorrect sir. All things being equal in terms of teacher one and teacher two earning the same amount of pay, and assuming teachers one and two paid the exact same amount in income taxes, the difference is in extra earned pension benefits. Just like anyone else, teachers one or two could invest in a pension or 401K or gold or stocks or whatever, and the payout is money earned from that investment and has nothing to do with SOC. WTF dude.
My math isn't incorrect. People have been making the same point as I made since back in the 1970s, and no one has shown since then that the math was wrong.
So the question is why do I find that public employees can receive windfalls from Social Security?
The answer is that, unlike a state/local govt pension, Social Security is progressive. So the benefits you receive on your next dollar of earnings/contributions depends on the amount of earnings/contributions you already have. When public employees aren't covered by Social Security, they appear poor to Social Security's benefit formual because it can't "see" their non-covered earnings. That's how the windfalls happen, and the Windfall Eliminatinio Provision was introduced in 1983 to address it.
Lastly, I just have to add the highly unlikely situation where a SS-covered teacher is making the exact same income as her husband, and having the exact same AIME as him, thus eliminating any of spousal benefit never mind a Survivor benefit.
If two spouses are covered under Social Security, the spousal benefit the low-earning spouse is eligible for is reduced dollar-for-dollar by their own benefit.
Under the Government Pension Offset, the spousal benefit for a person with a non-Social Security-covered job is reduced only 67 cents on the dollar for the government pension benefit received. Even with the GPO, the public employee may receive a windfall.
With the GPO eliminated, the windfalls can be massive. This is an obvious and meaningfully large disparity, all the in the name of "fairness."
I forgot to add that FERS employees and all governmental employees who pay in SS do receive the full survivor benefit as well as their own pension, assuming the survivor benefit is greater than their own Social Security retirement benefit, which most likely it will be if the beneficiary planned correctly.
Oh, AND they can receive their survivor benefit WHILE deferring their own benefit to allow Delayed Earnings Credits to accumulate until they reach the age of 70 as well.
A teacher affected by GPO can't do this.
An additional point regarding federal employees who are covered by FERS: they pay into FERS (and the TSP) ON TOP of paying into Social Security. The non-covered employees affected by the WEP and GPO pay into a government pension INSTEAD of Social Security.
It totally makes sense to coordinate benefits between Social Security and pensions that act as a substitute for Social Security. But there isn't a need to coordinate between Social Security and pensions that operate as supplements to Social Security. It's just a different situation.
The situation that you describe is possible only if the spouse dies before the worker reaches age 70. That obviously happens sometimes but is far from the usual situation. Usually, both spouses live to age 70 and beyond. You need to work pretty hard to devise scenarios where the GPO disadvantages a beneficiary.
One thing that Andrew misses is that the average teacher salaries in Texas, Georgia and Virginia, places I'm familiar with that have teachers affected by WEP and GPO, the average salaries are much less than 72k.
So to compare a teacher in CA vs. one in TX is not an apples to apples comparison, especially when it comes to pensions.
Many teachers in these areas have quite small pensions and ones in TX, in particularly, only get boosts upon legislature consent. I don't know how COLAS work in GA and VA.
They also lose the entirety of their survivor benefit upon death of the husband too, thus leaving them with a fraction of the pension their peers in CA or NJ get. And those peers in CA and NJ also get the ENTIRETY of the survivor benefit, while receiving their public pension, even if they don't get any spousal benefit.
Of course, the GPO is a moot point if they're single. So, then they get hit with a $550 reduction in the social security benefit due to WEP. So a single teacher with say 20 years experience gets all of a $3k a year pension, if that. That extra $550 goes a LONG way towards retirement security. Oh, need I say, that many of these are MAGA voters too, as they live in the South.
Seems an easy win to reward your base with a minimal expense of $550 a month.
Teacher salaries in TX, GA and VA are below the national average, but so are other wages and the costs of living in those states. So teachers there remain middle income, not low income.
Moreover, as I noted over at Twitter, public employees in these states and elsewhere have pensions that are generally much more generous than what employers pay into 401k plans. And, in retirement, public employees -- including those who would benefit from the Social Security Fairness Act -- don't generally have below-average incomes. As the Urban Institute pointed out, most are upper income in retirement.
It may be technically possible to find examples where a public employee is made worse off from the WEP/GPO than if they had participated in Social Security like everyone else. I haven't constructed one yet, but it's possible. However, I believe the WEP and GPO in most cases reduce but don't eliminate the windfalls that public employees receive.
For instance, if you're in Social Security than any spousal benefit you're eligoble for is reduced dollar-for-dollar by your own Social Security benefit. But the GPO reduces spousal benefits by only 67 cents for each dollar of non-covered pension benefits. In the teach examples I wrote up, windfalls exist even after both the WEP and GPO are applied.
So the Social Security Fairness Act simply fails any sort of equity test and any sort of need test. I
I also have not been able to construct a situation where a public employee/retiree is made worse off by the WEP/GPO. I also believe it's possible, but obviously, the opposite situation is much more common. I explored examples where the governmental retirement plan provides very small benefits but still triggers the WEP/GPO. Those examples aren't really plausible, however, because public employees in a retirement plan that is not “comparable” to Social Security would be covered mandatorily; that provision requiring coverage was enacted into law as section 11332 of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 (Public Law 101-508), effective on July 2, 1991.