Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act of 2023
Floor Speech
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Mr. SMITH of Missouri. Mr. Speaker, the windfall elimination provision, or WEP as it is more commonly known, was put in place more than four decades ago to prevent workers with earnings that were exempt from Social Security payroll taxes from getting more generous treatment from Social Security than workers who spent their whole careers contributing to Social Security.
Unfortunately, WEP still results in overly generous payments for some while unfairly penalizing others.
H.R. 5342, the Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act, provides current beneficiaries affected by the WEP with an additional $100 per month and replaces the current-law WEP for future beneficiaries with a new formula that bases benefits on a worker's total career earnings.
This past year, the Ways and Means Committee has held more hearings on WEP than in any other Congress in the past 20 years and identified that the WEP formula could be replaced with a formula that provides all beneficiaries with a fair benefit based on their actual earnings using data that wasn't available when the WEP was put in place 40 years ago.
The bill before us today, the Equal Treatment of Public Servants Act, replaces the WEP with a new formula based on this now-available earnings data to more accurately adjust benefits.
While I have concerns with this bill's short-term costs, I commend my colleagues and the chairman of the Budget Committee, Congressman Jodey Arrington, for his dedication to finding a pragmatic solution that ultimately improves the financial health of the Social Security programs over the long term.
It is vital that any solution to WEP protects the Social Security trust funds that all beneficiaries rely on. I know a very similar proposal to permanently replace the WEP used to share bipartisan support of members of the Ways and Means Committee, but, unfortunately, my Democrat colleagues abandoned this approach several years back.
I share the goals of this legislation and encourage my colleagues to work with myself and Chairman Arrington to develop a permanent, bipartisan solution that permanently fixes the Windfall Elimination Provision, and the related government pension offset, while also protecting the Social Security benefits of all retirees, which could actually pass the United States Senate and become law.
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