President Bush late Wednesday signed the long-awaited Postal Civil Service Retirement System Funding Reform Act of 2003, which will save the U.S. Postal Service about $5.6 billion over the next two years and avert a rate hike until 2006.
“It came right down to the wire and I wasn’t sure [the President] would get to it in time with all the other clamor going on around Washington now,” said Neal Denton, executive director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers. “It’s a real tribute to the coalition [of mailers] that it got done so quickly.”
The Direct Marketing Association is also pleased that the bill has been signed into law, and that mailers will have steady rates until 2006, according to DMA spokesperson Louis Mastria. “Now we can concentrate on other things, like the reform issue,” Mastria said.
Late last year, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management discovered that the USPS had overpaid the Civil Service Retirement System fund that pays its retired employees pensions by more than $71 billion. But in order for the USPS to reclaim the money, both houses of Congress had to pass new legislation changing the funding formula.
Since last fall, a large number of mailer groups have lobbied Congress to pass this law.
Just the same, most of them see if as only a stopgap measure.
“Although this first step clearly recognizes that the Postal Service
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