[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 144 (Thursday, October 6, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: October 6, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                    MORE THAN MANDATES ARE UNFUNDED

  Mr. LAUTENBERG. Mr. President, there has been a lot of talk about 
unfunded mandates here in the Congress and throughout the country. It's 
a serious problem and I have cosponsored legislation designed to 
address it.
  But more than mandates are unfunded in this country. Pension funds 
for public employees, especially those who so successfully serve State 
and local governments, are certainly underfunded and may become 
unfunded if we fail to deal with this problem.
  A Wall Street Journal article of April 6, 1994 quantified the 
problem: ``State and local pension plans across the country are more 
than $125 billion short of the money they will need to meet their 
pension promises.'' The article goes on to suggest that various States 
are adopting various strategies to deal with the problem through tax 
increases or benefit cuts or some combination of the two. Neither of 
those are very desirable options but they are better than the 
alternative: ``In some dilatory States, the underfunding problem may 
worsen,'' the article warns. The article then goes on, I'm afraid, to 
identify my own State as an offender, saying that ``a prime example is 
New Jersey, where Gov. Christine Todd Whitman is hoping to save about 
$660 million through July 1995 by tinkering with retirement-plan 
funding.''
  My point, Mr. President, is that no State is doing an adequate job of 
protecting the pension interests of its employees. More than that, I do 
not believe the Federal government has done a good job of protecting 
the integrity of those State pension funds either. There is a national 
interest operating here and we have to step up to it. Just as we 
created ERISA to deal with the problem of private pension underfunding, 
we need to look at legislation to protect public employee pension 
rights through PERISA, the Public Employees Retirement Security Act.
  We can't break the promise that has been made to the people who make 
government function. We can't allow dedicated public servants to risk 
financial ruin because their pensions aren't there when they are ready 
to retire. We can't endanger the fiscal stability of governments 
throughout this country by allowing unfunded pension liabilities to 
continue to mount.
  So, Mr. President, I am going to urge my colleagues in the Congress 
and my friends in the administration to make this a high priority next 
year. Working together, we should evaluate both the scope of the 
problem and the viability of various proposals to fix it. This is a 
problem we can and should and must address.

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