If postal worker Newman can transport a mail truck full of bottles and cans to Michigan, goes an old episode of Seinfeld, he can recycle them for twice the refund value offered in New York. But he can’t make the numbers work except the week before Mother’s Day – when Newman can commandeer a postal truck intended to deliver mountains of greeting cards for the holiday.
Newman’s scheme ends disastrously, of course. He must hitchhike back home after losing both his stash of recyclables and the mail truck.
As cartoonish of a misadventure as that was, it’s not as bad as the actual scheme Congress has right now for the US Postal Service (USPS).
Pending before the U.S. Senate is the Postal Service Reform Act (HR 3076), a bill designed to keep our redoubtable Post Office on its appointed rounds. But while it has the word reform in its name, the bill neither dictates – nor even requires – any substantive, meaningful reform to the failing federal agency. Everyone knows the Post Office has to change with the times. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy even put forward a 10-year plan that wants to treat the agency like a business rather than an entitlement program with extra steps. But the Democrats (and far too many Republicans) are content to just throw money at it.
HR 3076 isn’t a reform act; it’s a backdoor bailout.
While the coronavirus damaged USPS along with everything besides the mask industry, there are problems systemic to the agency that predate 2020, as DeJoy recently testified. Since 2007, USPS has recorded enormous losses every year, adding up to a grand total of $92 billion, with projected losses of another $160 billion over the next 10 years.
All that for a service rendered mostly obsolete by the technology that allows you to read this article.
In 2020, the USPS requested a no-strings-attached $75 billion bailout, which then-President Donald Trump called “a joke.” USPS received $10 billion in aid in the CARES Act in 2020, yet the long history of failure has not been addressed by structural reforms. That should have been to just help it with the (understandable) challenges of the coronavirus, not a temporary lifeline for a financially unsustainable enterprise.
Beyond the lack of reform, the biggest shortcoming of HR 3076 is that it eliminates postal prefunding payments of retiree health benefits, dumping postal obligations for employee healthcare into Medicare. This ill-conceived accounting gimmick will expedite Medicare’s insolvency (on track for 2026) while increasing its costs. This provision would be a $60 billion hit to a program already stretched thin.
The program is funded a little unusually, with Part A funded by trust fund cash while Parts B and D are available to federal retirees who opt into the program. The USPS would only be paying for wrap-around healthcare plans that pick up items not covered by Medicare, like vision, dental and hearing. All this for an agency that is supposed to be self-sufficient because it is capable of generating revenue.
Furthermore, while one of the defenses for our needlessly bloated postal infrastructure is we can’t neglect rural parts of the country, this bill would slow rural delivery – which is probably a good idea, given that total mail volume is down and farmers don’t really need their remaining junk mail delivered six days a week. However, the plan comes with the support of the same oh-so-righteous Democrats, like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who campaign against these exact types of reforms.
As though that would save the party from its ongoing rural demise.
Given this, it begs the question if anyone actually read this bill before it was voted on. It passed by a staggering 342-92 vote in the House, meaning Democrats had enormous Republican support. Democrats have proven hypocrites on the rural issue while Republicans’ typical fiscal responsibility lip service ignores the Medicare shell game and lack of real reform.
Thank goodness (yet) again for the Senate. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) has pushed back on this bad bill, but he could use the support of other conservatives like Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). Conservative rural senators like John Thune (R-S.D.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) need to weigh in on this as well.
Americans do not send mountains of greeting cards to their mothers every year. We don’t need fleets of postal vehicles and armies of expensive federal employees. We’ve got a reform bill that provides no substantive reforms and puts even more burdens on our Medicare system. If Congress isn’t serious about updating the Post Office for the 21st Century, this bill doesn’t need to be recycled; it belongs in the trash.
