A House vote would send the bill to the Senate, where a counterpart (S-597) has enough sponsors to pass over a filibuster there. Image: JohnKwan/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffA legislative maneuver designed to compel a House vote on a bill (HR-82) to repeal the government pension offset and windfall elimination provision has attracted the needed number of backers but time has all but run out for holding a vote before mid-November at the earliest.
A majority of House members has signed a “discharge petition” to bring the bill to a floor vote even though it has not been approved at the committee level, a major development in the years-long effort to repeal those two provisions of Social Security.
For those who draw benefits from a retirement system, such as CSRS, that does not include Social Security, the WEP reduces any Social Security benefit earned through other employment, while the GPO reduces, and often eliminates, any spousal or survivor Social Security benefit from a spouse’s Social Security-covered employment.
Once a discharge petition draws a majority of the House as signatories, there is a waiting period of seven legislative days, after which sponsors may request a vote that would have to be held within two legislative days after that. However, the House is scheduled to go on a recess starting Friday (September 27), not returning until November 12.
It appears that the chamber will stick to that schedule, since a deadlock over continuing agency funding past September 30 that might have required Congress to stay in session longer has been resolved by a leadership agreement, with final voting expected by the end of this week.
A House vote would send the bill to the Senate, where a counterpart (S-597) has enough sponsors to pass over a filibuster there, but which also has remained pending in the committee level.
However, there are many potential complexities in the House process, including the possibility that the pertinent committee—in this case, Ways and Means—would report out the bill in the meantime, possibly with changes such as new language to soften rather than repeal those provisions. That would leave floor vote scheduling once again in the hands of the chamber’s leadership.
The committee has before it several options along those lines, and the CBO may have introduced a new consideration recently by estimating that repeal would increase Social Security spending by $196 billion over 10 years and advance by six months the exhaustion of that system’s trust fund.
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