As we’ve been saying for a long time, America’s dangerously underfunded defined-benefit corporate and public pensions are little more than lavish Ponzi schemes designed to swaddle one generation of retirees with lavish benefits (a fixed monthly income and health benefits until death), while siphoning payments from a younger generation that will never reap the benefits (what’s worse, these “contributions” have been climbing, even as funds have been forced to raise fees and contributions, which has done little to address the underlying issue).

While public pensions funds have hogged most of the media spotlight, Congress has been quietly taking steps to address a more vulnerable sector of the pension space. To wit, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sneaked a provision into this year’s budget deal that established a committee to decide how to prevent the retirement benefits of 1 million Americans from evaporating once thousands of failing “multiemployer” plans finally collapse into insolvency.

That committee was given a deadline of Nov. 30 to propose a solution. And while many ideas have been bandied about (including raising fees, levies and contributions on healthy plans to subsidize their failing cousins), from the beginning, it’s difficult to imagine how this $500 billion shortfall (the aggregate underfunding of these corporate pension plans, according to an estimate from Boston College) could be covered without the American taxpayer footing the bill. Adding to the urgency, nearly one-quarter of the 1,400 multiemployer plans in the US are in the “red zone,” meaning they will likely go broke within the next decade. And if the recent bout of turmoil across virtually all asset classes continues, the day of reckoning could be hastened. Particularly if the low returns on conventional assets force these funds to place riskier bets on alternative strategies like hedge funds, something that many funds did in desperation during the ZIRP era.