One of the final bills former President Joe Biden signed while in office was a long-awaited fix to boost the Social Security benefits of 15,000 public sector workers in Alaska, but the Trump administration has offered no timeline for when it’ll be implemented.
On Thursday, Alaska U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski — who championed the measure — and Dan Sullivan signed a letter asking the feds to speed up the process so that nearly 3 million public sector workers can have their benefits boosted as Congress intended.
“We call for the immediate implementation of this legislation to provide prompt relief to the millions of Americans impacted by (the changes),” says the letter signed by the 28 senators.
The legislation eliminated Social Security windfall and pension provisions, which docked Social Security benefits if workers also received a state retirement. In Alaska, the problem was compounded because the state has not only opted out of Social Security for public workers but also doesn’t offer a pension retirement but a 401k-style retirement plan. It affected workers with a private sector career and later work for the state or local government.
Amid all the chaos in the federal government, the Social Security Administration posted a webpage that says the agency “cannot yet provide an estimated timeframe for when we will adjust a person’s past or future benefits, but we will continue to provide updates on this webpage. We thank the public for its patience.”
It says it could be more than a year before it’s implemented.
The agency says the delay is largely due to the Social Security Administration’s budget constraints, which lacks the manpower needed to adjust benefits. This situation will likely get worse as the Trump administration pushes to slash vast swaths of the federal workforce.
“The law requires SSA to adjust benefits for over 3 million people. Since the law’s effective date is retroactive, SSA must adjust people’s past benefits as well as future benefits,” explains the administration’s website. “Though SSA is helping some affected beneficiaries now, under SSA’s current budget, SSA expects that it could take more than one year to adjust benefits and pay all retroactive benefits.”
The letter
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
