By Daisy Brown, Legislative Liaison, TSCL
The Social Security Fairness Act, signed into law by former President Biden in January, will raise benefits for 3.2 million Americans who receive pensions for work that Social Security doesn’t cover. This means that many public workers—such as firefighters, teachers, and police officers—will no longer have their retirement benefits penalized for pursuing careers in public service. Qualified beneficiaries will also see retroactive adjustments on their 2024 benefits.
However, it looks like these public servants will have to wait a while before their updated benefits start rolling in.
The Social Security Administration (SSA), in a recent online update, said that it expects it will take more than a year to implement the Social Security Fairness Act. This is because the bill did not provide funding for implementation, which means SSA must divert resources from its day-to-day operations, such as customer service functions, to adjust affected beneficiaries’ past and future payments. In its statement, the agency cites ongoing staffing shortages and a hiring freeze as additional roadblocks to implementation.
Retroactively adjusting beneficiaries’ payments presents an especially difficult challenge, according to SSA. The agency says the changes require difficult, mostly manual calculations that they must conduct on an individual case-by-case basis. Making the calculations manually not only slows the work down but also increases the likelihood of errors.
In the meantime, some affected beneficiaries await life-altering changes to their benefits. SSA says that, while some people’s benefits will increase very little under the new law, others will be eligible for more than $1,000 extra per month. It comes as little to no surprise, then, that many Americans have reached out to learn when their updated benefits will take effect. SSA says that more than 7,000 people reached out to speak to one of its customer service representatives about the Act, which adds another layer to the workload of implementation.
All in all, this saga highlights an important truth of legal reform: The devil is in the details. No matter how good the idea behind a law is, it’s essential that our elected officials provide agencies with resources and milestones to carry out new legislation. While we at TSCL fought hard to help get the Social Security Fairness Act passed, there’s still more work to do to make sure that America’s public servants get the retirement benefits they deserve.
