The American Rescue Plan is best known for its $1,400 stimulus checks, expanding the Child Tax Credit, aid to local governments, and more recently, possibly contributing to inflation.
A lesser known portion of the bill sent $86 billion to help many financially troubled retirement plans.
President Biden is attempting to highlight that controversial provision Wednesday, appearing in a Cleveland high school to promote the American Rescue Plan's Special Financial Assistance program, which is intended to shore up troubled multi-employer pension plans across the country, including Ohio, where many unionized workers entered the plans only to see them go into insolvency.
Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh is accompanying the president and said in a tweet that the law will protect millions of workers in multi-employer pension plans. A White House official said that 2 million to 3 million workers and retirees will be spared dramatic cuts, and that every multi-employer pension plan that faced near-term insolvency and benefit cuts is projected to remain solvent through 2051, and many of them will be for much longer. There are Sen. Sherrod Brown D-OH and Rep. Marcy Kaptur D-OH, amongst others. The President is going to talk about the Department of Labor's proposed final rule for the program, which will clear the way for the program to begin in earnest.
Since the funds were set up decades ago to support workers in specific industries like food processing and trucking to allow them to have a unified retirement plan that would follow them from job to job within their industry, it has been a long-time priority for lawmakers like Brown.
In 2017 a report found that there were 1,400 multi-employer pension plans in the U.S. covering 10 million people, with around 100 of the plans in critical and declining status.
The Central States Pension Fund, a Midwest-based fund that covers around 400,000 Americans, is one of the most distressed plans. The plan's administrators put in their application for relief earlier this year and say that the infusion will allow Central States to remain solvent in the years ahead. Between 1.5 million and 3 million workers could benefit from the aid, according to analysts.
A tracker for the program said it had already doneled out money to save over 127,000 pensions.
Sen. Brown predicted that it would help probably 100,000 people in my state in a 2021 interview with Yahoo Finance. Other members of the Senate, including Sen. Chuck Grassley R-IA, have blasted the provisions as a blank check, with no measures to hold mismanaged plans accountable. The bill called the Butch Lewis Act, which had bounced around Congress for years, has been criticized for its inclusion in the American Rescue Plan, because it had little to do with the coronaviruses epidemic.
Biden's trip is intended to shore up support for blue-collar union workers. While Biden lost Ohio in 2020, he flipped nearby union-heavy states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to defeat Donald Trump and regain the White House for Democrats.
In Ohio, Biden's economic development efforts suffered a blow recently when Intel delayed the unveiling of $20 billion semiconductor factory in Ohio as legislation in Washington stalled in Congress to invest more than $52 billion in the semiconductor industry.
Ben Werschkul is a writer and producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.