Federal Pension Insights

Government Executive's Editor-in-Chief Tom Shoop helped bring some facts to the debate over the generosity and funding of government employee pension plans when he appeared on the Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio on Thursday.

One of Shoop's main points, as he wrote in Government Executive's FedBlog:

My job was to explain why the federal system is at considerably less risk than state and local plans. (The main reason of course, being that the Federal Employees Retirement System has shifted more of the burden to the individual to be responsible for retirement savings via the Thrift Savings Plan, while plans at lower levels of government still tend to rely heavily on a pension component.)

Listen to the show here.