Postmaster General and CEO Patrick R. Donahoe told an annual gathering of mailing delivery persons that they must build “excitement about the power of mail and the future of mail.” Last week, on March 18, Donahoe urged the mailing industry to make mail “more personally relevant, more actionable, more functional and more creative.”
On August 5, the USPS announced plans to transition to modified 6-day delivery. The union has pulled out all the stops to prevent any cuts or cost saving measures.
On Thursday, March 21, Senator Tom Coburn, M.D., R-Okla., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., urged to the United States Postal Service Board of Governors in a joint letter to “resist political lobbying” and utilize their legal authority to move forward with the modified six-day delivery plan announced on February 6, 2013.
“The Board of Governors has a fiduciary responsibility to utilize its legal authority to implement modified 6-day mail delivery as recently proposed,” the letter reads. “The deficits incurred by the Postal Service and the low level of liquidity under which it is operating leaves it in a perilous position; one that demands implementation of all corrective actions possible.”
The lawmakers noted that the Obama Administration did not include the removal of the existing provision requiring six-day delivery in its communications to Congress as a necessary step for the implementation of the modified delivery plan.
Coburn and Issa noted that the Postal Service has the legal authority to pursue its modified six-day delivery plan in part because “as proposed, the Postal Service is not eliminating a day of service, but is merely altering what products are delivered on what day, to maintain a sustainable level of service.”
The lawmakers reminded the USPS that in fiscal year 2012 alone lost $15-9 million and reached its federal borrowing limit of 415 billion. The Postal Service has also defaulted on $11.1 billion in payments due to the U.S. Treasury to fund already accrued retiree health care liability.
“Without major, immediate restructuring actions, annual operating deficits will increase, and the Postal Service will sink much deeper into default on payments owed to taxpayers,” the letter notes.
In his address, the Postmaster General said the Postal Services’ reduction efforts as “aggressive” and “listed their impacts on the mailing industry: reducing the size of the workforce by 193,000 employees since 2006; reducing the organization’s cost base by $15 billion; reducing 21,000 delivery routes; and consolidating the network of mail processing facilities while maintaining record levels of service.”
“No other organization that I can think of — either public or private — has gone through a similar downsizing so rapidly and continued to function at a high level,” said Donahoe. “It all comes down to one word for this industry: affordability. The faster we can reduce costs, the better we can avoid pressure to raise prices. That’s why we continue to seek comprehensive reform legislation to provide more flexibility in our business model to create a sustainable platform for the future.”