That part is right! The problem comes at the end of a career when the SSA needs, under the WPA rules, to weigh what the teacher in question is going to be paid by the teacher’s pension (which by design was paid into instead of social security) against what the teacher paid into social security via payroll taxes before or after their career as a teacher, or during summer work during their career as a teacher. The SSA then reduce the social security benefits according to their formula. The reduction can be pretty extreme, all the way towards a person who paid into the social security trust not receiving any benefit from it.

I’m not fully familiar with the stated justification for these laws, or why you’d want to treat a pension as a ”windfall,” (or maybe they’re trying to keep social security benefits from being a “windfall?”) but I guess my main thought on that as a non-teaching, non-union professional is that we are all very lucky these rules were drafted a year or two before 401ks came into wide use, such that we avoided someone in congress getting the bright idea of treating our tax deferred retirement savings as a “windfall” to be factored into the SSA’s payment calculations as well.

I believe the problem of losing a spouse’s survivor’s benefits happens under the GPO rules, and that is similarly unpopular.