The U.S. Postal Service is waiting for President Biden’s signature to take advantage of legislation designed to relieve some financial burdens that have been on the balance sheet for more than a decade.
The Senate on Tuesday passed the Postal Service Reform Act, by a 79-19 vote. The measure had cleared the House a month earlier, by an unusually bipartisan vote of 342-92.
“The post office usually delivers for us, but today we’re going to deliver for them,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, New York Democrat, told reporters before the vote.
Among other moves, the measure will remove a 2006 requirement that the Postal Service, alone among government-allied operations, prepay health-care costs for retirees decades before those employees actually retire.
This has resulted in billions of dollars in “losses” reported by the USPS since 2007, since the agency balked at making the cash-draining payments.
The measure shifts health-care costs to Medicare, with the USPS making up differences for current retirees. This shift drew criticism from some Republicans, including Sen. James Lankford, Oklahoma Republican, who voted against the bill.
“This bill doesn’t bring the essential reforms needed for the future of the Post Office. Instead, it uses Medicare funds to bail out the Post Office,” Mr. Lankford said in a statement.
“I don’t believe taking a portion of the Postal Service’s financial problems and making them Medicare’s problem is in the best interest of Oklahoma taxpayers, Medicare beneficiaries, or the Postal Service,” he added.
Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia Democrat, praised the bill, however, calling it “a strong first step towards improving the costly and unacceptable delays within the United States Postal Service.”
“The USPS provides essential services to Americans across the country, and it is crucial that we maintain a healthy and solvent USPS moving forward,” he said in a statement.
One of the country’s original Cabinet departments, the former U.S. Post Office Department became a quasi-governmental corporation in 1971, adopting the U.S. Postal Service name.
The goal was to make the agency self-supporting, financed through the sales of stamps, parcel delivery, and other services. The USPS receives no federal funding and will not get any under the new measure, advocates said.
The lofty goal of self-sufficiency crumbled under the dual ascent of the internet and online bill paying as well as alternative delivery services for overnight correspondence and parcels.
The USPS has seen sharp drop-offs in first-class mail volume during the past 20 years, the class of service which essentially underwrote costs in other areas. Companies such as UPS, Federal Express, and DHL — the latter being the owners of Germany’s privatized postal system — made serious inroads into USPS territory.
The new bill aims to rectify some of the problems while maintaining certain standards that had been under attack periodically over the years.
One aspect of the new measure will keep a USPS requirement of six-day-a-week mail delivery.
Cost-cutters have long urged the axing of Saturday deliveries, while advocates have said the current schedule is important for seniors and others depending on mail-order deliveries of medications. The Department of Veterans Affairs medical system operates its own prescriptions-by-mail service, for example.
“Our postal carriers deliver an important service and this bipartisan bill delivers for them, and for everyone who relies on the Post Office,” said Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat and a co-sponsor of the legislation. “This bipartisan bill has been a decade in the making. It will help modernize the Postal Service and make it more efficient and reliable. This type of bipartisan reform is long overdue.”
Among the bill’s other provisions is one backers said will promote “greater transparency” for postal consumers.
It mandates accessible publication of weekly service data on the Postal Service website, as well as detailed financial and operational reports to Congress every six months.
Perhaps anticipating the legislation’s passing, the USPS said last Friday that the average time to deliver a mailpiece across the postal network was 2.7 days in the first eight weeks of the fiscal year’s second quarter.
They said 86.6% of first-class mail was delivered on time against the USPS service standard, a decrease of 2.5 percentage points from the fiscal first quarter.
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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