Garret Graves U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 6th district | Official U.S. House Headshot
Garret Graves U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana's 6th district | Official U.S. House Headshot
U.S. Congressman Garret Graves (R-LA), co-author of H.R. 82, the Social Security Fairness Act, issued a statement in response to the $195.6 billion Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of future Social Security graft at the expense of public service retirees.
“The CBO has confirmed: if H.R. 82, the Social Security Fairness Act, is not signed into law this year, $195.6 billion in Social Security benefits will be stolen from public service retirees over the next decade. And since CBO only looks forward, not in the past, it is staggering to think of the literal hundreds of billions stolen from public service retirees over the last 40 years when they needed it most. We have to make it right and ensure that our teachers, police officers, firefighters and others receive the Social Security benefits they earned during their careers serving the public. These folks sacrificed so much to serve us. How can we continue to sacrifice them? Members need to sign our discharge petition to bring H.R. 82 to the floor for a vote now,” said Graves.
Representatives Garret Graves (R-LA) and Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) reintroduced the Social Security Fairness Act in January 2023 at the start of the 118th Congress. In November 2023, Graves and Spanberger urged the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee to hold a hearing on reforms to the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO), which was held later that month. In March 2024, they urged the Committee to take further action by holding a markup on their bipartisan Social Security Fairness Act.
The WEP reduces earned Social Security benefits for individuals who also receive a public pension from jobs not covered by Social Security, such as educators who work part-time or during summers in jobs covered by Social Security but do not earn benefits through their primary employment in public schools. The GPO affects spousal benefits for federal, state, or local government employees whose jobs are not covered by Social Security by reducing by two-thirds any benefit received by surviving spouses who also collect a government pension.
Currently, approximately 2 million Social Security beneficiaries are impacted by WEP and nearly 800,000 retirees are affected by GPO.
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