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WASHINGTON - Congressman Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land) today announced that he has signed on as a cosponsor of H.R. 4391, The Public Servant Retirement Protection Act. The bipartisan measure, introduced by Congressman Kevin Brady (R-The Woodlands), replaces the unfair Windfall Elimination Provision in order to protect Social Security benefits for public employees, including Texas teachers. This bill has already been endorsed by the Association of Texas Professional Educators (ATPE), Texas State Teachers Association (TSTA) and the National Education Association (NEA).

“Congress needs to concentrate on fixing Social Security so Texas teachers and other public workers can properly prepare for retirement,” DeLay said.

The bipartisan bill guarantees public servants can keep benefits they earned while they paid into the federal program. Under the bill, Social Security will no longer be determined by an arbitrary formula but will be based on a new “proportional formula” that takes into account each worker’s actual work history.

“Full repeal of both the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset is special treatment, not fair treatment,” DeLay said. “Brady’s bill treats all workers equally, which is exactly what they are striving for. It takes the right steps to ensure public workers aren’t strangled by the safety net that is supposed to protect them.”

Social Security is designed to help keep people out of poverty. To accomplish this, it replaces more earnings for lower-wage workers. Under the current formula, if a worker has a job not subject to Social Security taxes, as many public employees do, the benefit formula records “zero” earnings for that job. But if a person has multiple years of “zero” earnings included in his or her average earnings, he or she may appear to have had low wages when that was not the case.

To prevent more generous benefits than intended from being awarded, current law modifies the benefit formula for workers who paid into a Social Security substitute (like the Teacher Retirement System of Texas) for part of their career. But that formula does not take individual cases into consideration, leaving many public servants with less Social Security.

Under Brady’s legislation, the Social Security Administration will calculate benefits based on an individual’s actual work history, and benefits will not be less than what that individual has earned. The “proportional formula” takes into consideration the entire work history, not just those years paying into Social Security.