It wasn’t very long ago when mailers were lauding the Bush administration for its willingness to rectify a long-standing actuarial problem that caused mailers to pay billions more in postage than was absolutely necessary to fund the U.S. Postal Service’s retirement obligations. Last year’s correction to the USPS’ civil service retirement accounts is what has made it possible for the postal service to delay the need for another postal rate increase until 2006. Ostensibly, one of the key reasons the administration agreed to this fix was to help the USPS avoid a rapidly approaching fiscal catastrophe.
Unfortunately, what governments give, governments also are known to take away. In this instance, the take-away has been in two forms.
The first is the administration’s dogged instance to saddle the postal service with all pension liabilities, including those that did not derive from postal employment. In the not very distant past, a retired member of the military would look to the U.S. Treasury to fund his or her retirement. Now all one former soldier, sailor or marine has to do is find gainful employment with the postal service, even for only a year, and the USPS — not the Treasury — will be left holding the retirement funding bag.
The second comes from the administration’s abrogation of a promise that Congress had made to pay the USPS some $900 million over a 40-year period to retire a revenue forgone funding deficit that Congress had incurred.
Abraham Lincoln once was quoted as saying, “You can fool some of the people all of the time,” and P.T. Barnum was known for “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Given the shabby treatment mailers have received at the hands of their supposed savior, it looks as if Lincoln and Barnum were talking about the mailing industry.
Indeed, it appears that rather than pull the USPS and its customers back from the brink of sure financial peril, the administration has decided to push them over. For the very crisis that last year’s civil service retirement funding reform was supposed to delay, pending more comprehensive postal reform, will be hastened by the White House’s decisions to saddle an even greater fiscal burden on the backs of its postal fiscal mule.
The Bush administration seems to lack a full appreciation of what such actions will mean to the sectors of our economy whose business interests are tied in one way or another to the preservation of our mail delivery system. One can only hope it has properly sized up the likely political consequences.
GENE A. DEL POLITO is president of the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) in Arlington, VA.
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