Members of Congress could lose their federal pensions, if a lonely House Republican gets his way and gets an assist from President-elect Trump.
Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., introduced the EPIC Act — Ending Pensions in Congress —with the ambitious goal of passing the bill as early as next month. The Florida Republican hopes that the current anti-Washington mood, and the results of the presidential election, could grease the skids for the bill’s passage.
“It is very much in line with Donald Trump’s drain-the-swamp agenda,” DeSantis told the Washington Examiner. “And that’s the difference: things like this in the past, they just don’t didn’t see the light of day. Well, now, if he starts getting involved, you could.”
DeSantis believes “taxpayer-funded pensions for members of Congress are a relic of a bygone era and constitute a waste of taxpayer funds,” as he put it in a Thursday statement accompanying the bill’s introduction, but his proposal wouldn’t have a major impact on federal spending. The legislation would discontinue pensions for new members and anyone who has served fewer than five years’ in office, but it wouldn’t affect any current beneficiaries.
There were only 620 retired lawmakers drawing a pension as of 2015, according to federal researchers.
“Of this number, 344 had retired under [one federal pension program] and were receiving an average annual pension of $74,136,” according to the Congressional Research Service. “A total of 276 Members had retired with service under [a second pension program] and were receiving an average annual pension of $41,316 in 2015.”
Those pensions increase in value the longer an elected official stays in office, the CRS report also noted. DeSantis, who renounced his own pension in 2013, hopes that eliminating the pensions would cut away one of the incentives for lawmakers to make a career in Washington, D.C.
“I think combined with something like term limits I think what the incentives would be, you go, you get some stuff done, but then you kinda gotta go back,” he said. “And that would be it. Some of these guys that have been here, you get the pension, you become a consultant on K Street, whatever, and you’re really immune from dealing with a lot of the laws that you passed.”
Perhaps the greatest value is political, however, given that Trump rose to power on the strength of voter anger at the government. “Just imagine, if we’re doing things like some of the lobbyist reforms he wants to do, term limits, we’re ending pensions in Congress — imagine if we did that in the first 30 or 45 days,” DeSantis added. “The American people would say things are actually changing.”
If that’s true, DeSantis suggests, lawmakers might have the positive and negative incentives to vote money out of their own pockets. “I think, if [Trump] starts tweeting about this, then I think Congress is going to be forced to act,” he said.
