The House Oversight and Government Reform committee voted last week to approve H.R. 22. And during the hearing, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., made what sounded to me like a very questionable assertion:
At each hearing the news about the state of the Postal Service’s finances has gone from bad to worse… postal officials have notified us they will have trouble making their payroll.
The first part of this statement is undeniably true. But I was skeptical of the second part, about not making payroll, so I checked in with the Postal Service. And the Postal Service tells me it never made that claim to Congress.
The Postal Service has said it won’t be able to make a required $2.3 billion payment into its retiree health care trust fund. But there’s never been any talk of missing payroll. I specifically asked the postmaster general about that when I interviewed him earlier this year, and he said there was no chance of the Postal Service missing its payroll.
