Congress just pushed Social Security closer to the brink to appease unions, but few seem to care

As they rushed home for the holidays, members of Congress approved legislation that will extend additional Social Security benefits to workers whose municipal employers didn’t always pay fully into the fund.

It was a gift to labor unions, but one that came with a hefty price tag for the fast-depleting Social Security trust fund that lawmakers have failed to fix for decades.

The Congressional Budget Office warns the Social Security Fairness Act – as it was called – will cost $196 billion over the next decade to provide added benefits to some 3 million Americans, depleting the trust fund by a whopping $20 billion a year.

When the House and Senate approved the legislation in bipartisan fashion, they skipped the pay-as-you-go legal requirements. That means no new funds are allocated to replenish the extra burden on the fund, though there were some small savings in food stamps.

Only a handful of lawmakers raised any concerns about further speeding Social Security’s pending sand clock expiration date.

“This is not a small bill: $20 billion is a huge spending commitment by Uncle Sam,” Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., one of the few to raise concerns, told Just the News during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “It was very frustrating for me to watch it get out of the House.”

The House approved the law in November by a vote of 327–75 with one member abstaining.

“It's just shocking given that we just had a bunch of Republicans win, and this is happening when the Republicans are in charge," Grothman lamented. "We just had a bunch of Republicans run on, ‘We have too much inflation because we're spending too much money,' and the first thing they do, even before they're sworn in in January, is decide to spend another $20 billion.

"And it’s just another throwing gasoline on the fire of inflation, driving America into even more in debt, one of the, I would say, dark days of the Republican Party."

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., offered an amendment to the bill to help offset the price tag with a few changes, including gradually raising the retirement age to 70, but he was rebuffed before his Democrat-controlled chamber approved the law.

“It is absurd to entertain a proposal that would make Social Security both less fair and financially weaker,” Paul said when he introduced his amendment. 

The CBO’s assessment of the new law warned that the Social Security trust fund is about to hit the red in 2034 but benefits could begin being cut even six months earlier as a result of the new law.

“Based on the estimated effects of the bill through 2034, CBO expects that the bill would advance the exhaustion date for the combined trust funds by roughly a half a year,” the assessment reads.

The bill’s beneficiaries are sympathetic figures: cops, firefighters, teachers and other municipal workers whose employers – state and local governments – chose not to contribute the employer share of the Social Security obligations.

That decision lowered the estimated Social Security benefits of such workers when they retired, a point public worker unions made to Congress.

“Millions of retired teachers and firefighters and letter carriers and state and local workers have waited decades for this moment,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.,, declared after the Senate passed the law 76-20 early Saturday morning. “No longer will public retirees see their hard-earned Social Security benefits robbed from them, thanks to this bill.”

Unions were ecstatic by the passage after years of failing to garner congressional support for the change.

"The Social Security Fairness Act gives retired fire fighters and millions of other dedicated public servants the benefits they earned and paid into,” said Edward A. Kelly, general president, International Association of Fire Fighters. “The IAFF applauds Congress for ending this theft.”

Critics of the law don’t oppose the front-line workers but wanted the legislation to cover its new costs or be part of a larger reform to save the Social Security trust fund that has been lurching toward insolvency for decades.

“We want to help in making this happen, but our preference was for it to be part of a much larger Social Security reform,” Dan Adcock, director of government relations and policy at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told CNBC.

Grothman said the states and cities knew what they were doing and should have covered their own shortfalls, and that the workers who took the jobs would have known of the consequences when they got hired.

“Every state made this decision," he said. "If they didn't like the decision, they could go to their state legislature and fix it there." he said.

The Wisconsin Republican noted Democrats refused for years when in charge to approve such a solution.

“You’ve got to remember this bill used to be killed by Nancy Pelosi, and normally you figure when the unions are asking for more government money that would be a Democrat thing. But Nancy Pelosi was always, I give her credit, responsible enough, and the Democrats were responsible enough to say, 'Hey, we don't have the money,'” he said.