Several Senators have blasted the U.S. Postal Service for paying $280 million in bonuses to its managers of top-performing units, at a time when the Service predicts loses in the billions.
Senators Fred Thompson (R-TN) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) questioned the pay outs last year to roughly 80,000 managers when its officials knew the postal service would have to raise rates for the second time in less than two years to head off a financial crisis.
Thompson was quoted by Scripps Howard News Service as saying that postal officials needed a “reality check” to approve bonuses “at a time when they were planning to seek new rate increases amid predictions loses of between $2 billion and $3 billion defies logic.” Thompson chairs the Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee.
In the same report, Sessions questioned whether postal officials are purposely keeping profits low “to justify rate increases.” He said that the USPS would have ended fiscal 2000 with a surplus instead of a $199 million loss if they did not pay out the bonuses. Sessions is a member of the Senate Judiciary’s administrative oversight and courts subcommittee.
Reportedly hearings into both the bonus program and all postal operations are being planned this spring by Thompson’s committee and the House Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), according to spokesmen at both Thompson
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