Biden (Still) Isn’t Going Quietly Into that Good Night

Photo by Guille Álvarez on Unsplash

In the week leading up to President Joe Biden’s exit from the White House, it’s understandable to shift more attention toward the incoming administration (especially since we will be inaugurating a racist felon on Martin Luther King Day) and assume the outgoing one is running out the clock to January 20.

But despite virtual media silence, President Biden, the most legislatively consequential leader in decades, is leaving office with some of the most significant “Trump-proof” additions to his four-year legacy.

Weeks after a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Social Security Fairness Act, President Biden signed it, eliminating the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO) that reduced or eliminated retirement benefits for more than 2.4 million public service retirees, like police officers, firefighters, teachers, federal, state, and local government employees.

Biden explained at last week’s signing ceremony that beneficiaries will “receive a lump sum payment of thousands of dollars to make up for the shortfall in the benefits they should have gotten in 2024. They’re going to begin receiving these payments this year. That’s a big deal in middle-class households.”