When President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act on Jan. 5, it was a victory for those who tirelessly lobbied for years for new changes that will provide more generous benefits to public workers with pensions.

Yet for the policy community, the enacted change backed by overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate is a huge disappointment.

“Literally, you cannot find a Social Security expert who thought Social Security Fairness Act was a good idea,” said Andrew Biggs, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The new law eliminates two provisions that adjusted Social Security benefits for individuals who also receive pension income from work performed in the public sector where payroll taxes to Social Security were not paid.

The now defunct Windfall Elimination Provision, or WEP, reduced Social Security benefits for approximately 2 million individuals who also have pension or disability benefits from work where they did not contribute to Social Security. The WEP was enacted in 1983.

The Government Pension Offset, or GPO, reduced Social Security benefits for nearly 750,000 spouses, widows and widowers who receive their own pensions from work in the public sector. The GPO was created in 1977.

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The provisions were intended to help ensure all Social Security beneficiaries get a comparable payout from the program. Because Social Security is progressive and intended to be an anti-poverty program, low-income workers receive a higher income replacement rate when they collect benefits. The WEP and GPO were intended to adjust public workers’ benefits so they were not treated as low-income workers.

Once the bill was signed, organizations that lobbied for the change praised the new law for finally providing affected workers the full Social Security benefits they had earned. For the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the new law caps off a decades-long fight to either modify or repeal the rules.

“It’s a way of cutting benefits for a class of people who are providing a public service for our communities,” said Maria Freese, senior legislative representative at the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“They got singled out, and their Social Security earns them less in benefits than a person who decided not to go into public service,” Freese said.

As the new law is phased in, Social Security beneficiaries may see monthly benefit increases ranging from an average of $360 to $1,190, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated. Affected beneficiaries will also get lump-sum payments for the extra benefits they would have received throughout 2024.

The law makes the program “more fair” now that people will no longer be penalized for income earned outside of the system, said John Hatton, staff vice president for policy and programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, or NARFE.

Notably, income from capital gains or inheritances already did not influence the size of Social Security benefits. The same should be true for income earned outside of the program, Hatton said.

Yet many policy experts maintain the changes never should have been enacted.

“What we saw was a huge special interest push for a very poorly developed and poorly targeted policy which is creating windfalls for a number of recipients,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Notably, that change will cost almost $200 billion over 10 years, according to the CBO, at a time when Social Security’s trust funds are already running low. The program’s combined trust funds are expected to last until 2035, at which point 83% of benefits will be payable, Social Security’s trustees projected last year. Eliminating the WEP and GPO will bring move that depletion date six months closer.

Experts both for and against the Social Security Fairness Act agree Congress needs to address the program’s funding shortfall sooner rather than later.

The Social Security Fairness Act was passed by the Senate with a 76-vote bipartisan majority. Amendments that were introduced in those final legislative hours in December — including efforts to add ways to pay for the change or alter the provisions instead of replacing them — failed. The Senate took up the bill after the House passed it in November with a 327 bipartisan majority.

Now that the WEP and GPO elimination has become law, one way to make the changes more equitable would be bring the 25% of state and local workers who do not currently contribute to Social Security into the program, according to Munnell.

While Congress could revisit the changes it just made with the Social Security Fairness Act, experts say that’s unlikely.

The bigger problem lawmakers now face is when and how to restore the program’s solvency.

“We are still in a place where politically it’s very difficult for members of Congress to come out in support of any substantive, responsible changes to the program that will address its long-term fiscal issues,” said Emerson Sprick, associate director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Future action will require presidential leadership and a commitment to address the issue, Sprick said.

However, for now, President-elect Donald Trump has promised not to touch Social Security. Trump has also said he wants to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefit income. Trump’s presidential transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Because that change would be expensive, over $100 billion a year, and does not have the same fairness argument to it, it would be less likely to go through, according to Biggs.

While Trump has promised no benefit cuts, that creates a mathematical problem for Republicans, who are typically a low-tax party, he said.

Ultimately, restoring Social Security’s solvency may require benefit cuts, tax increases or a combination of both.

“We know that we need to be addressing Social Security and Medicare because of the insolvency that they both face within roughly a decade,” MacGuineas said. “Neither party, no leader, seems to have the political will or the integrity to start talking about how to get that done.”

In his final days in office, President Joe Biden announced that his administration would forgive student debt for more than 150,000 borrowers.

That relief includes nearly 85,000 people who attended schools that “cheated and defrauded their students,” 61,000 borrowers with a total and permanent disability and another 6,100 public service workers, Biden said in a statement.

“Since Day One of my Administration, I promised to ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity, and I’m proud to say we have forgiven more student loan debt than any other administration in history,” Biden said.

Since Biden took office, he has forgiven debt for more than 5 million federal student loan borrowers, totaling $183.6 billion in relief.

In 2023, the Supreme Court blocked the president’s plan to deliver wide scale student loan forgiveness for tens of millions of borrowers.

But the Biden administration still managed to wipe away a large share of the country’s outstanding student debt by improving the U.S. Department of Education’s existing debt relief programs.

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Consumers in a handful of states are paying to help make the mattress industry more eco-friendly — and more states may follow suit?

Four states — California, Connecticut, Oregon and Rhode Island — now levy a flat fee on any mattress or box spring residents purchase online or in a brick-and-mortar shop.

The retail fees, which range from $16 to about $23, help finance state recycling programs that divert used mattresses from landfills — part of a growing policy initiative to boost the circular economy across common household items from plastic packaging to paper products and electronics.

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Americans discard about 15 million to 20 million mattresses each year — an average of 50,000 a day, according to the Mattress Recycling Council, a nonprofit formed by the bedding industry to operate state recycling programs.

Yet, more than 75% of a mattress is recyclable, according to MRC: its wood, steel, foams and fibers can be stripped, sold and reused.

Oregon implemented a recycling fee on Jan. 1. State residents who buy a new mattress or box spring pay an extra $22.50 per unit, reflected as a “stewardship assessment” on consumers’ receipts.

California and Connecticut raised their retail fees to $16 per unit at the beginning of 2025, up from $10.50 and $11.75, respectively. Rhode Island raised its per-unit fee to $20.50 last year.

The industry is also working with lawmakers in Massachusetts, Maryland, New York and Virginia to establish similar programs, according to MRC spokesperson Amanda Wall.

A directory compiled by the Mattress Recycling Council lists just 58 companies nationwide that recycle such products. Those in states that haven’t enacted recycling laws generally charge fees to consumers for drop-off and home pickup. (I recently paid $95 for such a service in New York City, for example.)

Oregon officials say their program will make it easy for consumers to recycle unwanted mattresses and reduce illegal dumping.

It aims to establish “new convenient locations in every county for residents to drop off their mattresses” and also create recycling sector jobs, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality website.

The state recycling efforts are examples of “extended producer responsibility” laws gaining traction in the U.S.

“With EPR, producers of products or packages become responsible for managing them when they become waste,” according to Reid Lifset, a resident fellow in industrial ecology at Yale University and editor of the Journal of Industrial Ecology. EPR programs provide a new source of funding to make the recycling system sustainable, Lifset said.

In the case of state mattress programs, retailers pass along the consumer fees to the Mattress Recycling Council to fund each state’s respective program, Wall said.

In Oregon, for example, more than half (about $12) of the $22.50 retail fee will fund program operational costs in 2025, with the remainder funding things like start-up costs, administration, and public education and advertising.

There are more than 300 mattress collection sites in states with recycling programs, according to MRC. The sites accept discarded mattresses at no cost. (They may charge for home pickup, however.)