[smsm42]

In even shorter, whoever designed those plans failed to account for the fact that future economic environment may be different from the current one. Despite that being pretty much their only job - otherwise they could just give that money to people to invest for themselves in 401k, IRA, etc. plans. The whole notion of one big pension plan is based on the premise that whoever manages this plan knows what they're doing better - or at least not worse - than non-professional people could, and even than most of people on professional market could. "We didn't predict interest rates could change" doesn't really inspire confidence in that premise.

The worst aspect, though, is that the next step would be to ask for my and other taxpayer's money to fix the botched job the pension managers did. And next worst aspect would be that this request would never be refused, because you can't deny people their money, can you? That means, if they work for the government, if they not, you can take their money as much as you wish, that's why they are called "tax payers".