Committee includes 8 Senators and 8 Congressmembers 

Senator Helped Write & Introduce Bill to Make Sure 2,000 ND Families who Paid into Pension Fund Can Keep their Retirement Savings; Committee will Force Congress to Consider her Bill

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp today announced that she was appointed to the new 16-person bipartisan, House and Senate Joint Select Committee tasked with solving the pension crisis threatening 2,000 North Dakotans and 400,000 pension fund participants across the country who paid into Central States Pension Fund, as well as many retirees in other pension funds.

The Committee is made up of 16 members who were appointed by House and Senate leaders. The members include eight senators and eight congressmembers, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats.

Heitkamp helped secure the creation of the Committee as part of the overall budget compromise that Congress passed earlier this month. It’s an important 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.

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 provide a process for Congress to consider Heitkamp’s bill and work toward a bipartisan solution that can solve the pension crisis. If Congress doesn’t act, these retirees and their families will see severe cuts to their hard-earned retirement savings.

“It’s an honor to be selected to serve on this bipartisan Committee where I will be at the table to advocate for a just solution to secure the pensions of thousands of workers and retirees across the country, including so many across North Dakota,” said Heitkamp. “We need to reward hard work by making sure workers and retirees who put their lives and labor into their jobs for decades get the pensions and retirement savings they paid into. Unfortunately, for many of these workers and retirees, that promise has been ripped away and it isn’t fair. This Committee isn’t the immediate, permanent solution I hoped for, but it will force Congress to address the severe pension crisis across the country – and I’ll push for the Butch Lewis Act to be the solution.”

“It means a great deal to know that Senator Heitkamp is on this Committee, where she can continue to fight for us just as she has over the past several years,” said Dennis Kooren, a retired UPS driver in Fargo and Heitkamp’s guest to the State of the Union. “Our fight is about justice and fairness. We worked tough jobs for years if not decades to put food on the table for our families and we paid into our pensions to save for retirement so that our families would be taken care of later on. But now, through no fault of our own, those pensions could be taken away. We had hoped the Butch Lewis Act would pass in Congress, but this new Committee will force Congress to find a solution to the pension crisis facing thousands of workers and retirees, and we hope the bill will be the answer.”

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 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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