THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

When Congress set out to reform pension law last year there was all manner of wonderful rhetoric about how the system needed improvement to protect the retirement ofthose who had worked diligently all their lives. And then Congress sprung into action. Now it looks like those corporate buttboys have actually managed to make things worse all around.

Then the political horse-trading began, with lawmakers, companies and lobbyists, representing everything from big Wall Street firms to tiny rural electric cooperatives, weighing in on the particulars of the Bush administration's blueprint.

In the end, lawmakers modified many of the proposed rules, allowing companies more time to cover pension shortfalls, to make more forgiving estimates about how much they will owe workers in the future, and even sometimes to assume that their workers will die younger than the rest of the population.

On top of those changes, companies also persuaded lawmakers to add dozens of specific measures, including a multibillion-dollar escape clause for the nation's airlines and a special exemption for the makers of Smithfield Farms hams.

As a result, the bill now being completed in a House-Senate conference committee, rather than strengthening the pension system, would actually weaken it, according to a little-noticed analysis by the government's pension agency. The agency's report projects that the House and Senate bills would lower corporate contributions to the already underfinanced pension system by $140 billion to $160 billion in the next three years.

That shortfall raises the specter of more pension plans failing, pushing their liabilities on to the government, according to the agency and critics of the bills. And some companies with fully financed pensions feel unfairly penalized by having to pay higher pension premiums to make up for others' shortfalls.

We elect these people time and again and then never pay any attention to what they do and this is what we get. But we can rest assured that their pensions are still sound and complete.