The financially ailing U.S. Postal Service is scheduled to file its long-awaited modernization plan with Congress Thursday.
Sources close to the USPS said the plan now on tap is basically the same as the rough draft that was released last August. It will offer three options, including leaving the USPS as is (with added authority to set rates and changes services). The other choices include a top-to-bottom legislative restructuring, and turning the USPS into a private corporation so that can enter into negotiated service agreements with large-volume mailers.
The USPS posted a $1.6 billion deficit last fiscal year and a $199 million deficit the year before. The losses have been attributed to such things a increased use of electronic communications instead of paper mail, rising labor and fuel costs as well as the after effects of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and anthrax scares.
The latter option would maintain the postal service’s monopoly over addressed first class and Standard (advertising) mail, while allowing the USPS to transfer products and services that compete with those private carriers to a privately held USPS subsidiary.
Most of the options sources said the USPS would include in its plan have been contained in one form or another in several postal reform bills that have been introduced since June 1995. None of those bills ever made it out of committee.
While postal insiders and Capitol Hill staffers doubt that Congress will go along with keeping the USPS as is because it does little to curb mounting losses, they do predict that congress will go along with some moderate legislative action to give the USPS some of the freedoms it wants, but not all.
The plan will be filed file with the House Government Reform and Senate Government Affairs Committees.
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