Social Security Fairness Act signed into law by Biden, enhancing retirement benefits for millions

President Biden on Sunday signed legislation expanding Social Security benefits for millions of retired Americans, including firefighters, police officers and teachers.

“Americans who have worked hard all their life to make an honest living should be able to retire with dignity,” Mr. Biden told a gathering at the White House before signing the Social Security Fairness Act, which he said would mean an average monthly increase of $360 for more than 2.5 million Social Security recipients. 

Those beneficiaries will also receive a lump sum in the thousands of dollars to make up for retroactive payments for 2024, the president said.

The Social Security Fairness Act eliminates two federal policies that barred employees with a public pension from collecting their full benefits under the federal retirement program and that reduced benefits for those workers’ surviving spouses and family members.

“Biden is the first president in more than 20 years to expand Social Security benefits,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement. “The bill he is signing today will expand benefits by hundreds of dollars per month for more than 2.5 million Americans.”

The new law came in just under the wire, with Mr. Biden signing it only weeks before the end of his presidency and after the Senate on December 21 voted 76-20 to pass the measure in the waning hours of the 118th Congress. House lawmakers approved the bill, known as H.R. 82, in November.

Long, hard road

The push to enhance Social Security payments for public pension recipients has been decades in the making, with the Senate holding its first hearings into the policies in 2003. 

The Social Security Fairness Act had bipartisan support, yet faced last-minute objections from some Republicans due to its cost. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law would add an estimated $195 billion to the federal deficit over a decade. 

The benefits hike under the new law would be retroactive to December 2023. As a result, eligible recipients who previously only received partial benefits will get a full payment retroactive to a year ago. 

Specifically, the new Social Security law repeals policies known as the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO), which together act to reduce Social Security payments to 2.5 million retirees. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in September that eliminating the WEP would increase monthly payments to affected Social Security recipients by an average of $360 by December 2025, according to the Associated Press. 

Scrapping the GPO would increase monthly benefits in December 2025 by an average of $700 for 380,000 recipients getting benefits based on living spouses, the agency found. The increase would amount to an average of $1,190 for 390,000 or surviving spouses getting a widow or widower benefit. 

contributed to this report.