For nearly a decade, Connecticut officials have pointed to the 2017 SEBAC agreement as evidence that fiscal responsibility and political compromise can coexist. The deal, negotiated by the Malloy administration with the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC), was sold as a reform that would deliver billions in savings while stabilizing the state’s finances.
To ensure those claims could be verified, lawmakers built an accountability mechanism directly into the agreement. State statute requires the Comptroller to issue annual reports comparing projected savings with savings actually realized. These reports exist for one purpose: to determine whether the agreement delivered what was promised to taxpayers.
The original projections estimated roughly $1.169 billion in savings for FY 2025 alone. The Comptroller now reports realized savings of about $1.16 billion. On its own, that may appear close.
But the agreement was never meant to be judged in isolation, one year at a time.
FY 2025 sits atop a long record of missed targets, inflated projections, and realized savings that repeatedly fall short. Viewed in that context, this is not a success story. It reflects a pattern that has persisted for nearly a decade.
Since the Comptroller began issuing the required reports, only one year (Fiscal Year 2018) has exceeded projected savings. Every other year has fallen short. Cumulatively, the agreement is now $537.9 million behind what taxpayers were promised. That is not a rounding error. It represents the difference between a deal that delivered and one that was consistently oversold.
Despite this record, SEBAC continues to frame the agreement as an extraordinary act of sacrifice. Its public messaging emphasizes that union members “saved the state billions” and repeatedly “stepped up” through painful concessions. The implication is that those sacrifices create a moral or financial obligation for taxpayers today.
That narrative does not withstand scrutiny.
SEBAC typically cites a familiar list of concessions: wage freezes, higher employee pension contributions, increased health care cost sharing, higher co-pays, lower cost-of-living adjustments, new and less generous pension tiers for future workers, higher retirement ages, and stiffer penalties for early retirement. These measures are often presented as unilateral sacrifices imposed on workers.
In reality, they were negotiated tradeoffs.
In exchange, SEBAC secured something extraordinarily valuable: guaranteed job protection. The agreement locked in multi-year protection against layoffs, guaranteed step increases, scheduled wage growth later in the contract period, cash bonuses, and an extension of state employee health and pension benefits through 2027.
That level of protection is rare in the private sector. Under the SEBAC agreement, it was written directly into contract law.
Even during economic downturns, revenue shortfalls, or budget crises, the state was contractually barred from layoffs, while compensation and benefits continued to grow on schedule.
The often-cited wage-freeze illustrates the issue. SEBAC routinely treats “not getting a raise” as a concession. But a raise that was never contractually guaranteed is not something that can be surrendered. Treating hypothetical wage growth as a sacrifice turns the absence of a benefit into evidence of hardship. It is rhetoric, not accounting.
This history matters because SEBAC is once again negotiating new contracts.
The Lamont administration has already reached a tentative wage agreement with one bargaining unit that includes 2.5 percent annual raises through 2028, plus step increases that can add another two percentage points to pay growth. Dozens of additional bargaining units are still in negotiations. Once finalized, those contracts will come before the General Assembly for approval.
When they do, union representatives will again argue that workers are owed because of “years without raises.”
What will be quietly omitted is what those years included: ironclad job protection, guaranteed benefits, scheduled compensation increases, bonuses, and contractual security that most private-sector workers never experience.
Before approving another round of raises, lawmakers should revisit why the Comptroller’s savings reports were required in the first place. They were designed to protect taxpayers from selective memory. If past concessions are being cited to justify future compensation, then it is reasonable — indeed necessary — to examine whether those concessions actually delivered the savings that were promised.
So far, the record says they did not.
The SEBAC agreement may have reduced labor conflict, brought predictability to budgeting and simplified negotiations. But it did not deliver the level of savings it was sold to deliver.
That is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of record.
The reports were not created to measure good intentions. They were created to measure results. And the outcomes show an agreement that was consistently oversold and only partially delivered.
