After Sixteen Years, We Have Repeal! Thank You!

By now, most of you have gotten your retroactive Social Security payments for last year and the first two months of this year, and are receiving your fair benefit every month. For those of you who are still waiting, keep calling until you get an agent who can do the math and start your payments!

They said it couldn’t be done. We were told it would cost too much. There were roadblocks in the House, and many supporters of repeal were just tired of trying. It has been a long process, and this is how it happened.

For 40 years, the indefensible WEP and GPO penalties deprived millions of retirees a total of as much as a billion dollars every year. If you were a stay-at-home parent for 15 years, and then became a teacher, you lost all the Social Security spousal benefits your spouse’s community-property income had paid for. If you were a firefighter until your body gave out, and then worked in a Social Security-earning job, your benefits were deeply cut because you had earned only a partial firefighter pension. Public workers whose spouses had counted on leaving them Social Security survivor benefits often found that they got little or nothing from their deceased partner’s paid-for benefit.

Faulty legislation that few people understood had punished workers since 1984. Public-worker organizations like National Education Association (NEA) and National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE) fought for repeal since the beginning. California’s Dianne Feinstein sponsored unsuccessful repeal bills every session in the United States Senate for the first ten years of this century.

We started our Social Security Fairness action with a big rally in Berkeley in spring of 2009. The California Teachers Association (CTA) gave us major startup funding, and California Retired Teachers (CalRTA) helped support us until we became a registered non-profit in 2019.

We started by learning the process of getting bills passed. We got great support from David Walrath from CalRTA and from Al Campos when he worked for NEA. Ed Foglia from CTA-Retired Teachers was a constant mentor, as was Tim Lee from Texas Retired Teachers. Year after year, there were co-signers but nothing passed.

When the Connecticut Alliance President, Bette Marafino gathered presidents across the country to discuss this outrageous and unfair penalty on seniors, Jodi Reid of the CA Alliance got us from Social Security Fairness involved. We quickly connected advocates from across the country.

Over the nearly five years of Zoom calls across the nation, the National WEP/GPO Repeal Task Force, supported by the Alliance, and with representatives from several retiree organizations, shared information and ideas from a wide range of sources to organize a unified campaign. We were persistent!

Pam Alexandroff provided information on her FaceBook page and encouraged thousands of members to respond to Suzie Dixon’s CalRTA letters directed to specific legislators that zeroed in on the need for repeal.

We had a strong, coordinated national volunteer organization, but what finally made the difference in Congress? Two Congress Members who were willing to push the envelope. Representative Abigail Spanberger and now-former Representative Garret Graves took advantage of House rules to bypass the Ways and Means Members who had other plans and had always blocked our progress. Spanberger and Graves pursued a lobbying effort that pulled together advocates from public employee unions across the country to make a unified push for repeal. They enlisted powerful speakers like Patrick Yoes, President of the Fraternal Order of Police. The repeal bill passed the House with a 327-75 majority. Sherrod Brown and Susan Collins’ Senate bill passed 76-20.

Since the purpose of our website was to provide a resource for WEP/GPO information, we were gratified to see that the Chief Economist at the Bipartisan Policy Center had cited our Social Security Fairness website in his written report to the Senate subcommittee hearing on WEP/GPO on April 16, 2024. We hope it has been a resource for you, also.

The bottom line: In order to make a positive difference in this nation, we need doggedly persistent campaigners like you. Sixteen years of our Social Security Fairness campaign has finally paid off. Especially now, everyone needs to pick an important cause and stick with it. Thank you for sticking with us!

Although this will be our last newsletter, the website will remain up. The website will have relevant news and links to new information as the Social Security Administration institutes new changes.

Thank you again for sticking with us, and a special thanks to those of you who have donated to the administrative costs we have incurred.

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