The leading Republican and Democrat on the House Education & The Workforce Committee’s pension subcommittee said Wednesday they want to see legislation allowing troubled union multiemployer pension plans to reduce benefits to prevent or delay them from running out of money.

Multiemployer plans are common in industries where union membership is typical and in industries where adults often work for more than one company in a year, such as trucking, groceries and mining.

With half of the 5 million workers covered by the plans are seen at risk, subcommittee Chairman David Roe (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Democrat Robert Andrews of New Jersey said cutting benefits is a bitter pill for the budgets of retirees that needs to be swallowed.

Roe said small benefit reductions now will prevent huge problem in the future. At the same time, Andrews said, cuts need to be fair and negotiated collectively.

To protect the insurance covering the plans, Roe also called for increasing Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation premiums, but not to a level high enough to discourage employers from offering those retirement packages.

With the the deficit in the PBGC’s multiemployer insurance program expected to soar five-fold by 2022 to $26.2 billion, Roe said, it is threatened with insolvency that could lead to pressure for a taxpayer bailout. “We cannot allow that to happen,” the pension subcommittee chairman he said.

Roe said he is confident common ground can be found to save the insurance program and to aid the survival of multiemployer plans. “We have the time to do it and will to do it,” Roe said.

That time effectively ends next summer, before Congress goes into hibernation for the rest of the mid-term election year, National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans Executive Director Randy DeFrehn told the subcommittee Wednesday.

The group led a union-employer Retirement Security Review Commission that came out with a report in December that is seen by Roe as a starting point for legislation.

“We’re close to a formal proposal that could be turned into bill language,” DeFrehn said.