I think it's rather peculiar to call (part of) the system "fully funded" when evidently all this means is that there is provision in the budget for paying out current obligations. Compare this to the state of the Hawaii state pension fund which was reckoned a year ago to have $7 billion in unfunded liabilities. But that doesn't mean that there is no provision in the state budget to make current pension payments to retirees -- there is. What they've done, among other things, is increase the "matching" payments in the budgets of the various state departments that are made into the fund, as required year by year to find enough money to make the pension payments. Something like what the feds are doing. No one here, though, is trying to pretend that this counts as full funding of the pension system, which is still presumably billions in the hole. The Hawaii pension fund is not just a budgetary device, but a bunch of actual securities and other investments, and it's underfunded because there won't be enough in it in the future to meet the obligations of the pension system. But for the federal system, it seems to me, comparing apples to apples, just as the article claims, there is no actual pension fund there at all.