Iowa DOGE recommends cutting public worker IPERS for new hires

The Iowa DOGE task force wants to cut IPERS for new hires, the public employee retirement system that thousands of teachers, corrections officers, and more rely on to get them through their golden years.

This does not sit well with those workers, the unions they’re covered by, or young folks thinking about a government job. Some on Iowa Reddit (with 3,000 upvotes in three days) are even calling for a boycott of Fareway, whose CEO is on the Iowa DOGE taskforce.

“Police officers, firefighters, teachers, plow drivers, and more paid into IPERS and should be thanked for their service. They take salaries lower than typical private sector salaries, some because of the promise of IPERS,” said Rob Sand, a Democratic candidate for governor. “Weakening IPERS will stop many people from taking public service jobs, leaving the public worse off and more key roles unfilled.”

Iowa Republicans quickly came out and said, oh no, we don’t think we’ll do that.

Is this a surprising suggestion? It is not. It’s just one more slap in the face of Iowa’s public workers:

• Iowa Republicans passed one of the first “right-to-work” laws in the nation, in 1947.
• The state legislature stripped public workers of their collective bargaining rights in 2017, only letting workers bargain on wages.
• That same year, they made public workers vote to keep their union each time a new contract is up.
• In 2022, they cut unemployment for all workers by 10 weeks, which has hit seasonal workers like construction workers especially hard.

Now, the federal government under President Donald Trump is getting in on this, too.

Besides the massive layoffs of federal workers, the remaining ones are seeing their bargaining rights disappearing.

After Trump declared via executive order that the government would no longer recognize federal unions, the Veterans Administration announced it would terminate its contracts with unions, which is expected to affect more than 377,000 workers across the country. The Environmental Protection Agency followed suit.

If all departments end up caving to the order, it could affect contracts won by two-thirds of federal workers—and the nearly 10,000 Iowans who are federal workers, many of them VA employees, will be affected.

Are you a state or federal worker? What do you think? Email me.

This article originally went in the Iowa Worker’s Almanac. Thank you for subscribing.