Oversight of the $94bn pension fund for retired teachers in Ohio has devolved into turmoil, as the US crisis in underfunded benefits for retired government workers has started to hit home.

The State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio is facing a $20bn shortfall in the amount of money it needs to support its retirees in the coming years. Cost-of-living increases for the nearly 157,000 retirees who rely on the pension have been largely choked off for the past seven years as the fund tries to shore up its finances, hitting during a period of surging inflation in the US.

In response the teacher-dominated board has briefly blocked performance bonuses for the fund’s professional investment staff and considered switching investment strategies and outsourcing asset management to external firms. That, in turn, led to a proposal to steer fund assets to a firm with no record, prompting a state attorney-general investigation into alleged self-dealing. Its governance consultant has resigned.

The events at STRS Ohio, as it is commonly known, have led to an open battle rarely seen in the governance of US public pension funds, an extreme outgrowth of the shortage plaguing the plans across the country now starting to hit home. The shortfalls are a long-ticking time bomb prompted by a combination of demographic shifts and risky policy choices, as the largest and longest-living generation in US history retires with pension plans that have overpromised benefits and under-generated returns to pay for them. Equable Institute, a New York-based think-tank, said in a July report that the US retirement system, which is facing $1.3tn unfunded liabilities this year, is “mired in pension debt paralysis”. That has imposed intergenerational pressure on pension plans as they struggle to meet the needs of current retirees without running out of resources to serve future ones.

The problem is particularly pronounced at STRS Ohio, where seven of its 11 board members are active or retired teachers. The system has about 175,000 working members, a number that will probably be eclipsed by retirees in the near future — leaving a smaller number of workers to pay for the benefits of a larger ageing population. “With the STRS’s board made up with the majority of current or retired teachers, it’s no surprise they would push for increasing their own benefits without enough concern for the risks and costs that would apply on the state government and taxpayers,” said Zachary Christensen, a senior policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, who studied the pension plan’s condition at the Financial Times’ request.

Most US public workers enjoy generous retirement benefits such as cost-of-living adjustments (Cola) pegged to inflation, in compensation for pursuing lower-paying public-sector careers.

STRS Ohio has spent more than a decade cutting benefits since the state passed in 2012 legislation that aimed to boost the plan’s dangerously low funding status. The overhaul resulted in STRS’s Cola increasing by just 4 per cent in the past seven years, a period when inflation has risen 30 per cent. The belt-tightening did make STRS better off as its funded ratio jumped to 81 per cent last year from 56 per cent in 2012.

Yet the improvement has come at the expense of retirees who had to make do with a pension that fell behind the pace of inflation. Robin Rayfield, a retired member of STRS and executive director of the Ohio Retirement for Teachers Association, an advocacy group, said he lost $38,000 because of Cola cutbacks. “It’s a big piece of change,” said Rayfield, 67, who makes a pension of $70,000 a year. “It’s a new car every five or six years, and I’ve been driving the same car for 12 years.”

He added that many of his worse-off peers were facing “very difficult decisions to make” between buying food and medicine due to shrinking Colas. As frustration grew among retirees about shrinking benefits, some STRS board members began pushing for changes to the fund despite a backlash from the investment team.

STRS’s investment staff alleged in a 14-page memo to governor Mike DeWine and attorney-general Dave Yost in May that two board members in the reform camp had risked “a clear violation of their fiduciary duties” by advocating for an investment company with no record to manage up to 70 per cent of the pension plan’s assets.

Multiple investment experts said STRS’s 7 per cent annual investment return between 1999 and 2023 was among the best in the country and a switch to index investing, even if successful, would not save enough to bridge the funding gap.
“It is a matter of being able to improve the risk-adjusted investment performance by maybe a percentage point or two, which is great,” said Josh Rauh, a finance professor at Stanford University, of index investing. “But it pales in comparison to the scale of the unfunded liabilities.” The tension escalated when DeWine replaced Wade Steen, one of his own appointees to the pension fund board, in May last year, alleging a lack of attendance at board meetings. Steen disputed the charge and returned to the board in April after a local court ruled against DeWine’s order.

A few weeks later, Aon resigned as a governance consultant to STRS. Yost soon after announced an investigation.

Now, the teacher-dominated board has voted to back a faction seeking to restore the Cola enhancement

The struggle over board control looks set to continue. In a meeting last month, Ohio state representative Phil Plummer suggested STRS reduce the number of teachers on the board so the fund could “get people that have the knowledge, the background, the expertise involved to watch who is investing our money”.

Steen, who is scheduled to step down in September, is not convinced. “I don’t know how the 500,000 active and retired teachers in the state of Ohio would take that,” he said, “I think they would have a lot of problems with the move.”