It wasn't an issue that found its way into the debates - or into the presidential campaign at all, for that matter - but President-elect Barack Obama's position on mandatory Social Security coverage for state and local workers is a matter of record: he opposes it. At least, he did a few years ago.

In March 2005, then-Sen. Obama and 10 colleagues signed onto a letter opposing mandatory coverage that was sent to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley.

"We believe proposals requiring the mandatory participation of state and local employees in Social Security would starve public pension[s] of the continued flow of new participants needed to maintain solvency," the letter states. "Such proposals would disproportionately harm America's uniformed employees and place an undue burden on cities, counties, and states. Furthermore, forcing public employees into Social Security against their will does nothing to improve the long-term health of the program."

Obama, of course, will face different pressures as a president than he did as a senator, among them the likely need to take the lead in crafting a comprehensive Social Security reform plan. If he serves two terms, Obama will leave office the year that Social Security's annual revenues start to fall short of expenditures, according to the program's trustees.

Of great concern to opponents of mandatory coverage is that Obama's choice to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, is known to be a supporter of mandatory coverage. In 1998, Orszag, then an aide to President Clinton, told a group of public pension officials meeting with him at the White House that forcing all state and local workers to participate in Social Security was a "no-brainer" because nearly all Americans are already in the program and "besides, we need the money."

Orszag continued to push mandatory coverage when he went to the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank, advocating the measure in articles and a Social Security reform proposal he co-authored with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Peter Diamond.

"We hope that President-elect Obama will remember all of the reasons he signed on as an opponent of mandatory coverage once he is in the White House," CPRS Chair Terri Bierdeman said. "None of those reasons has changed. Mandatory coverage would be devastating for public employees and expensive for taxpayers, and it would do almost nothing to solve Social Security's financial problems. It is as bad an idea now as it has ever been."

Mandatory coverage would cost states and localities $44 billion over five years, while adding just two years to the projected solvency of Social Security, according to a 2005 estimate by The Segal Company. Obama's home state of Illinois would be one of the hardest hit, with the five-year cost reaching $4.2 billion. A 2007 study by the Teachers' Retirement System of Illinois and the Illinois State Universities Retirement System found that mandatory coverage would cost the state's public schools $3.4 billion over 10 years, an expense that would "almost certainly" result in lower retirement benefits and "would inevitably reduce funds available for education programs and services."