Heitkamp Announces Bipartisan Senate-House Committee to Solve Pension Crisis by Year's End

Press Release

U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp announced the creation of a bipartisan, House and Senate Joint Select Committee tasked with solving the pension crisis threatening 2,000 North Dakotans and 400,000 retirees across the country who paid into Central States Pension Fund, as well as many retirees in other pension funds. The solution the Committee produces will be guaranteed an expedited vote on in the U.S. Senate.

Heitkamp helped secured the creation of the Committee as part of the overall budget compromise that Congress passed earlier this month. It's a critical step to help solve the pension crisis threatening thousands of North Dakota retirees. The Committee will have instructions to report a bill by the last week of November. It will also be required to hold at least five public meetings. The Committee will be made up of 16 members to be appointed by House and Senate leaders. The members will include eight senators and eight congressmembers, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats.

For years, Heitkamp has been working with workers and retirees across North Dakota and fought to safeguard their retirement savings from harsh cuts. In November, she helped write and introduce the Butch Lewis Act that would put the pension plans back on solid footing so current workers, retirees, and employers have the security of knowing their pensions will be available for decades to come, without cuts. The creation of the Select Committee will force Congress to consider Heitkamp's bill and produce a bipartisan solution that can be voted into law. If Congress doesn't act, these retirees and their families will see severe cuts to their hard-earned retirement savings.

"These workers and retirees across North Dakota and the country did everything right. They worked hard their entire lives, often in labor intensive jobs, to support their families and save for retirement," said Heitkamp. "But without action from Congress, their retirements could disappear. Now it's up to Congress to work together for them and pass a long-term solution that will not cut their pensions. This Committee isn't the immediate, permanent solution we hoped for, but it's a step in the right direction. And it will force Congress to finally address this severe pension crisis -- and I'm pushing for that solution to be our bill, the Butch Lewis Act. I'm hopeful that the solution the Committee produces will restore the promise we made to our retirees -- that if you work hard and play by the rules you can have the dignified and secure retirement that you paid into."

In November, Heitkamp announced the Butch Lewis Act -- which she helped write and introduce -- during a rally in Bismarck with over 100 workers, retirees, and their families. The bill would:

Provide financing to put failing pension plans back on solid ground to ensure they can meet their commitments to retirees today and workers for decades to come.
Prevent a single dollar of cuts to benefits retirees have earned.
Put safeguards in place so pension plans remain strong so they will be there for today's workers when they retire.
Specifically, the bill would allow the Treasury Department to loan money, leveraged by safe investments, to pension plans to ensure that retirees and their families are guaranteed their promised benefits. This new bill would put the pension plans back on solid footing, ensure they can meet their obligations to current retirees and workers for decades to come without cutting the benefits retirees earned, and safeguard them for the future.

If the Central States Pension Plan and other pension plans are allowed to fail, not only will employers no longer be able to pay promised benefits, but taxpayers would be at risk of having to pay billions when the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), the government sponsored insurance company for multiemployer pensions, has an exposure of $59 billion and is projected to become insolvent by 2025. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of backstopping the PBGC, should it fail, would be $101 billion over 20 years. Such a consequence reinforces why workers, retirees, families, and communities are at risk through no fault of their own and must be protected.

Background

Heitkamp has been working with the Teamsters and North Dakota workers and retirees who are participants in the Central States Pension Fund to press for options from Treasury and the fund that don't include unfair and steep cuts to benefits. Heitkamp spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2016 to push the U.S. Treasury Department to reject the proposed harsh cuts, and joined retirees and workers at a rally in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. in 2016 to push back against cuts.

In 2016, those workers and retirees faced pension cuts of up to 60 percent under a plan to restructure the multiemployer pension plan, which is no longer solvent. After pressure from Heitkamp and workers across the country, Kenneth Feinberg -- the then-Treasury official overseeing the restructuring of the pension plan -- announced that the U.S. Department of the Treasury rejected the proposed cuts, saying they were unfair for workers and retirees who would be impacted.

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