The latest report (pdf) from the Postal Service’s inspector general looks at the payment schedule for the retiree health care trust fund. It concludes that the Postal Service is overpaying. A lot. If the Postal Service continues the payment schedule required by the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (the Act), our calculations indicate that the Postal Service could overfund its retiree health care liability by $13.2 billion by the end of fiscal year 2016. The Postal Service could pay on average $4.0 billion less each year from FYs 2009 to 2016 to prefund its retiree health benefits and…
Browsing: Postal Service
We’ll have more about this in Monday’s edition of Federal Times, but it’s an odd enough story that I think it merits a blog post tonight. The major postal unions — APWU, NALC, NRLCA and NPMHU — sent a letter on Tuesday to Jim Messina, the White House deputy chief of staff. They requested a meeting to discuss the Postal Service’s “deepening crisis.” They want the White House to intervene with Congress and reduce the Postal Service’s contributions to its retiree health care trust fund. Without that change, the Postal Service is going to run out of cash this year.…
I’m skimming over a conference report from the Senate Financial Services and General Government appropriations committee (really a fun way to spend your Wednesday afternoon!), and I came across this passage on the Postal Service: Because some experts, including OPM, have expressed concerns about the assumptions made in the Postal Service IG report, the Committee directs the Postal Service, in coordination with OPM and OMB, to develop a fiscally responsible legislative proposal to grant a limited measure of relief from the PAEA requirements to pre-fund retiree health benefits. If I’m reading this right, the Senate is not going to move…
I spent some time this afternoon analyzing the Postal Service’s year-to-date business, and the numbers aren’t good, to say the least. Mail revenue and volume are dropping far faster than the Postal Service expected at the beginning of the fiscal year — so postal officials could find themselves hundreds of million of dollars short of their projected $76.2 billion revenue this year. Data and graphs are after the jump. But first I should note that these numbers are a little imprecise, because they’re based on data from the first two quarters of 2009 (the third quarter ended on June 30,…
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…
That’s the conclusion from a new Gallup survey, which found two-thirds of Americans support allowing the Postal Service to switch to 5-day mail delivery to help fix its financial problems. 14 percent said they strongly favor the idea; 52 percent favor it. There’s less support for other cost-cutting measures: Only 11 percent of Americans would favor closing their local post office, for example. (2 percent are “strongly in favor” of it; I’d love to know who those people are…) But here’s the one that really interested me: 48 percent of Americans — a surprisingly high number — are okay with…
H.R. 22 was approved this morning by the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on the federal workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia (say that five times fast…). Now it goes to the full committee. More details to come over on the Web site.
One more Postal Service post: The House Oversight and Government Reform committee has (finally) scheduled a markup hearing for H.R. 22, the bill that would give the Postal Service some relief from its retiree health benefit obligations. Don’t get too excited, though: This is actually just a subcommittee markup. The bill has a long way to go before it becomes law. The bill was introduced in January and it’s been stuck in committee limbo almost ever since. The Postal Service says it can’t pay all its year-end bills if H.R. 22 doesn’t pass.
The Washington Post has an editorial this morning about the Postal Service’s deteriorating finances. Most of it is pretty sensible, but it includes this bizarre claim (emphasis mine): If it continues on its present course, the U.S. Postal Service stands to post $6 billion to $12 billion in losses by the end of the fiscal year. I have absolutely no idea where they got this figure. We reported last month that the Postal Service has lost $2.3 billion during the first half of fiscal year 2009. So it would have to lose a whopping $10 billion in just six months…
Federal agencies having a tough time meeting the plethora of green government mandates should take a close look at the 15 federal teams who have been recognized this year for spearheading environmentally sustainable practices at their agencies. Winners of the 2009 White House Closing the Circle Awards — handed out Wednesday during the middle of the three-day 2009 Federal Environmental Symposium East in Bethesda, Md. –Â Â are demonstrating best practices in areas such as recycling, green purchasing and fuel conservation. The big winner was the Air Force, which received four awards for initiatives under way at local bases and headquarters. The…