Editorial: The failure of Mayor Johnson's pension working group

In a few weeks, a working group appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson is scheduled to provide preliminary recommendations on how to address Chicago’s budget crisis.

We have little doubt, given the mayor’s understandable concerns about the city’s $1 billion-plus budget shortfall for 2026, that we’ll see a work product from that group. How useful it is remains to be seen, but there will be something to read.

We wish we could say the same about another mayoral working group that Johnson disbanded recently. That ad hoc body, which Johnson created in mid-2023 to confront the city’s desperately underfunded municipal pensions, will provide exactly zero recommendations on how to address that crisis.

The mayor acknowledged last week that the group was dissolved without producing a report, a damni