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Washington, D.C.—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) strongly supports legislation that would help ensure retirement income security for a large number of federal employees hurt by two provisions in current law, the leader of the nation’s largest independent union told a congressional committee today.
In testimony submitted to the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley repeated the union’s long-standing contention that both the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) “have devastating effects” on the retirement plans of many federal employees.
GPO penalizes many recipients of government pensions who are also eligible for Social Security benefits based on a spouse’s work record. It reduces the spousal Social Security benefit by two-thirds of the amount of the government pension.
The impact hits women particularly hard, Kelley said, since many of them are often eligible for only small federal pensions to begin with because they either interrupted their careers while raising families or worked in lower paid positions for much of their careers.
Social Security data show that hundreds of thousands of Social Security recipients—many of them elderly widows, President Kelley said—lose their entire Social Security benefit because of the GPO. “It is hard to believe that this is what the law intended,” she said.
“It is particularly galling,” the NTEU leader added, “that had they not dedicated their careers to public service, they would remain fully eligible to collect their spousal Social Security benefits.”
The Windfall Elimination Provision, on the other hand, cuts the retirement income of many federal employees by reducing their own earned Social Security benefit by as much as 50 percent. Under current law, a federal employee eligible for both Social Security and a pension from work not covered by Social Security, such as the Civil Service Retirement System, finds that a lower benefit formula is applied when calculating his or her Social Security benefit.
NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments.