Congress is really close to finally repealing Social Security restrictions on government retirees

Tom Temin: And John, this is really just a matter of scheduling a vote in the Senate at this point?

John Hatton: Well, it has to be planned and the votes have to pass. So there was a rally at the US Capitol on Wednesday the 11th, and Schumer said at that rally that he would call for a vote. He just filed cloture on the motion to proceed to the vote. It takes 60 votes to get through them to the first stage of the vote to end debate on the motion, continue and debate the bill. So and so the bill will be 50 votes. So the first vote, what we’re just looking for is everyone who said they supported the bill via co-sponsor votes for it, and it will pass. But that’s an if. Not all members of the House who said they would co-sponsor the bill voted for it by the end of the day. So we really need to make sure that every single person who said they would support this bill via co-sponsoring goes to the floor and votes for it.

Tom Temin: Yes, it sounds a bit morbid to say, but in the case of the CSRS employees of the federal government, the old public pension schemes for whom this is effective, it has to happen one of these days because they are an aging set of people.

John Hatton: Yes. And I hope that one of those days is next week and that the Senate votes on it and passes it. It’s something we’ve been working on for 40 years. It has penalized people simply because they have earned their public pension and then they earn separately through private sector work their social security benefits. And so our members, who are CSR’s pensioners, have never understood it. They have always been sad. They see it as theft, as do we, and so do the firefighters, the police, the teachers, the municipal workers around the country who are also affected by this. So it’s been a long time coming. It has been a frustrating process, with again a large number of members of Congress saying they support the bill. But we have always been frustrated by their ability to get a vote. And we were able to use the discharge petition to force a vote in Parliament. And when it came to the floor, 327 members of the House voted in favor and only 75 against. And with that pressure, laid bare with a lot of co-sponsors in the Senate, 49 Democratic co-sponsors, there was a big push to get this on the floor of the Senate for a vote. And Senator Schumer agreed to put it on the floor. And now we’re going to see how honest people are about what they say they’re going to do when they’re co-sponsoring a bill or not.

Tom Temin: And if somehow this doesn’t happen this time, the next Senate is of course Republican controlled. But given the Trump administration, or given the fact that Donald Trump is something of a maverick, you could say that it’s not a certainty, as it is with some other issues and some other policy issues, that he would oppose the elimination of WEP and GPO. He just last week came out in favor of the longshoreman in their battle with the ship operators in these contract negotiations. I’m just using it as an example that it’s not what you might have expected.

John Hatton: Right. Yes. No, they are changing political coalitions with Trump stepping in. And I think he’s had a different coalition than the George W. Bush coalition certainly had. So there is always an option there. But Trump has not campaigned to repeal the WEP and GPO. Biden did. He hasn’t put it into administration policies, but he campaigned and promised to support it. So our hope if it comes to his desk that he signs it. I think we had a strong bipartisan vote in the House. So there is an opportunity to get it through the house again. I think it would be more challenging to get a vote in the Senate with Republican leadership than with Schumer since there were 49 of the Democratic co-sponsors where there is not a majority of Senate Republicans who are co-sponsors.

Tom Temin: Right. And it’s hard to rebuild momentum when there’s such a big shift in the power structure for at least a few years. And the new team has all these different priorities. And they may even say, ‘Yes, I agree, that’s a good idea.’ But that doesn’t mean anything compared to what’s on the actual schedule for Congress.

John Hatton: Yes, I think it’s our real, I don’t want to say it’s our only option, but this is the best option we’ve ever had, and I think it’s going to be a better option, we have in the next two years. And we just can’t let it pass. I think it’s a testament to all the grassroots advocacy that NARFE has and other people have that have really driven this process and also driven the support in Congress.

Tom Temin: We speak with John Hatton, personnel vice president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. And then, except for the much-cited and still-repeatedly-cited article or op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal several weeks ago from Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk about DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. And they had some appearances on Capitol Hill, but there’s no real set 1600 point plan yet for what they plan to do. But Schedule F seems to be really high on the agenda, especially with Russ Vought coming back into government.

John Hatton: Yes, I think form F will be issued via executive. In the last Trump administration, it was issued via an executive order with directives to the agencies. I expect a similar executive order to be issued within the first week of the administration, and I would be surprised if it wasn’t. That, I think, was clear before this whole DOGE was created. And that will be, I think, a threat that we will have to deal with immediately. I think since the election, with the whole DOGE effort, which is still kind of wrapping our heads around exactly what that’s going to mean, I think it poses additional threats. And while it’s not a very clear plan, I think the Wall Street Journal op-ed laid out a process in how they intend to go about what they’re doing. I think they basically have three priorities. The first is not necessarily targeting federal employees, but targeting federal regulations. They seemed to indicate that they would embed small government conservatives in these regulatory agencies to conduct regulatory review. Exactly how they intend to repeal the rules is unclear. Do they reissue them and have Congress look at them via the Congressional Review Act? I think Rand Paul mentioned something like that. Are they saying these are unconstitutional based on the big question of doctrine? Do they even go through the notice and comment rules? So I think it’s unclear how they’re trying to deregulate and drastically reduce the number of regulations in the federal government. But it’s clear they will. And I think it’s clear that they’re going to try to do something there.

Tom Temin: I would say that is a good way you have laid out the options because rules are like dandelions. Some people like them, some people don’t, or they don’t like a particular one. I mean, it’s that everybody likes their regulation the way they want. But you can peel the yellow out by not enforcing it, but it’s still there. Or you can take it out at the root, which is legislative abolition of that type of thing. Or there is a hybrid way, put the spraying poison container on it. It could grow back, but that would be reregulation through the rulemaking process. And it is slow and careful.

John Hatton: Yes. And one of the things that I think they mentioned in the post was that they just wanted to stop enforcing rules that they intended to repeal. So there can be an intermediate step and then they start the more difficult process. And I think they will be legal challenges to many of these actions. However, the second step is, I think, more targeted at the federal workforce, especially though it wasn’t explicit. I think it was implicit that they are targeting the workforce of the regulatory agencies and downsizing them. So they say we don’t need these rules and therefore we don’t need the employees to issue them and enforce them. And they heralded a return to tenure politics aimed at getting people to quit so they don’t have to fire them later, potentially moves with the same goal. And if they don’t get where they need to go, then reductions are in effect. And they said, ‘Oh, we’re so cute. We are going to make voluntary severance agreements and early retirement buy-outs.’ But I think the idea is that they want to drastically gut the regulatory agencies. And then the third part, which is the government efficiency part, not the legislative part, but that’s what is waste, fraud, abuse. And I think our argument is that that’s a good goal, and you should partner with the public servants in the federal workforce to do that. I mean, you have Elon Musk tweeting GAO reports. It’s like it’s good or IG reports like they’re public servants. It’s federal employees saying this is what we want to do. So if all you want to do is implement GAO and IG recommendations, go for it. I believe that much of the waste, fraud and abuse that exists in the federal government is not driven by public servants and the federal employees, it is driven by contracts that are not effective. It’s driven by payments that shouldn’t go to people who shouldn’t get them, for example in Medicare or Medicaid. So that type of effort, I hope that there can be a shift in the public understanding of this and even maybe potentially in some of the administration that you need good public servants and federal employees to get to these goals.

Tom Temin: Right. You really have two questions. What should the government do and what should it not do? It is a question. But the other question is, when you decide what it’s going to do, do you want to make sure it’s doing it right? And it doesn’t require money sometimes.

John Hatton: Yes, I agree. I mean if you want to modernize the technology. It’s going to take money. And this idea that you can just fire a lot of the employees, the federal workforce. The size of it has decreased over the last 40, 50 years and especially down as a percentage of the total workforce. So the growth in government and spending has been on the contractor side of things, where there are 2 to 1 government contractors, the federal employees. And of course entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and the like. So this idea that there is such a huge over massive federal workforce is just not borne out by the facts.