She still supports Democrats’ shoveling taxpayer dollars to union pension funds.
Under questioning from Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), the ranking member of the Senate HELP committee, secretary of labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer said she supports the Butch Lewis Act, Joe Biden’s bailout of union pension funds that was part of the American Rescue Plan Act.
As of October 2024, the Department of Labor under Biden had doled out $69 billion in taxpayer money to multiemployer pension funds. The law authorized up to $86 billion for that purpose. The money comes with no strings attached. Pension plans were not required to make any reforms as a condition of receiving the bailouts. They aren’t expected to pay back the money. It’s just a giveaway from taxpayers to private union-backed pension funds.
Because it was part of the American Rescue Plan Act, not a single Republican member of Congress voted for the Butch Lewis Act. Including it in the ARPA was Sherrod Brown’s idea, the former Democratic Ohio senator defeated by Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024. The ARPA was Democrats’ inflation-boosting $1.9 trillion spending bill that rewarded Democratic constituencies with taxpayer money. One of those constituencies is organized labor, which has mismanaged and corrupt pension funds that can’t pay benefits they have promised.
The largest single recipient of bailout money is the Central States Pension Fund, which received $36 billion. Central States has been a slow-burning disaster for decades. Former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa used it as his slush fund. As Forbes reported in December 2022:
With Hoffa in control, the fund bought casinos, lent money to the mob and served as a piggy bank for its trustees. All of that culminated in the IRS rescinding the pension’s tax-exempt status and a flood of Department of Justice investigations. A 2018 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said that Central States “had less than half the estimated funds needed to cover liabilities in 1982 at the time it entered into a court-enforceable consent decree that provides for oversight of certain plan activities.”
Decades later, it was still struggling to recover. According to that same GAO report, Central States’ funding ratio – a measure of a plan’s assets to its liabilities – has rarely topped 70% over the last four decades. Even in the best of times, Central States funding ratio has never sniffed the 100% threshold recommended by the American Academy of Actuaries.
Even after the outright criminality had mostly disappeared, Central States continued to not fund its commitments for years. Rather than make any reforms, Democrats simply gave it taxpayer money to pay benefits for the next 30 years.
Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) raised the alarm last year about $127 million of the $36 billion going to 3,479 deceased participants in the Central States Pension Fund. The Department of Labor inspector general found these improper payments, which occurred despite repeated recommendations from the DOL and from the Government Accountability Office for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the agency that doles out the bailouts, to use the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File to verify whether recipients are alive. “Without updated procedures the agency will likely continue to approve applications which include deceased participants that could be identified with available information,” the inspector general said.
The message the Butch Lewis Act sent to pension plans is that irresponsible management will ultimately be rewarded with federal money. It’s the kind of thing one would expect from Democrats rewarding their political allies in organized labor, not from a Republican administration that is seeking to reduce wasteful government spending. Unions knew what they were getting when they endorsed Chavez-DeRemer for Congress, and though she has tried to backtrack on her previous support for the PRO Act, she still supports Democrats’ shoveling taxpayer dollars to union pension funds.