Public sector employee benefits

Factual Questions
1

Two questions…

  1. Do the federal pension benefit guarantees apply? Or does the PBGC just apply to private sector pensions?

If they did apply, would they only kick in if the city or state went bankrupt? Or might they apply if they simply said we don’t have enough money any more so we are going to quit paying your benefits…admittedly not likely to happen.

  1. Are their federal laws protecting state and local workers… or are there any state laws protecting local workers from having their benefits/pensions cut significantly or cancelled?
2

Retired state employee here. Nothing about Federal pensions is relevant to state pensions. My understanding is that for the most part they’re paid out by specific programs run separately from the state budget (employee and state pay in during employee’s career; program pays out to employee on retirement) to safeguard against legislatures raiding them or states with budget crunches defaulting on them.