Business Community Responds to USPS Task Force Report: Recommendations Likely to Make the Situation Worse for Prices, Services & Affordable Access; Focus Should be on Reforming the Prefunding of Retiree Benefits
Washington, D.C. (December 4, 2018) – The Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service (C21), an organization of public and private companies, trade associations and other industry groups which rely on the U.S. Postal System to do business, today raised grave concerns with the recommendations outlined by President Trump’s Task Force on the United States Postal Service.
Art Sackler, manager of C21, released the following statement on behalf of coalition members:
“While we’re pleased to see the Task Force agrees that the Postal Service should not be privatized, the reality is that many of the report’s recommendations will functionally privatize mail and package delivery by impairing the USPS’ ability to deliver everywhere and every day at an affordable price. Driving up prices will accelerate the departure of mail from an already declining base, and, at the very least, damage the USPS’ package business, which has been its lone and very profitable bright spot in recent years. If the Task Force’s price strategies become reality, they will decrease the Postal Service’s revenue and compromise its capacity to serve all of its delivery points.
“Among other things, we believe the ‘elasticity models’ relied upon by the Task Force are outdated and inaccurate. Other recommendations, such as recycling the previously rejected ‘fully distributed costing’ model, separating packages from mail and diluting the universal service obligation, are generally problematic – perhaps acutely so for rural Americans, who stand to lose the most if competitors and customers are incentivized to more rapidly divert USPS volume out of the system. Less volume means less revenue, and compromises mail and package delivery, which is especially crucial for millions of rural Americans who rely on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver medications, food, clothes and communications to every citizen, no matter how remote.
“What the Administration truly needs to do is work with Congress to reform the prefunding of USPS retiree health benefits. The existing mail and packaging price caps remain fully functional if retiree health prefunding is adequately addressed through bipartisan legislation that enjoys broad stakeholder support and is currently pending in the U.S. House and Senate. By lifting tens of billions of dollars from the USPS balance sheet, at no cost to taxpayers, the Postal Reform Acts would help stabilize the Postal Service for several years – giving everyone, especially Congress, breathing room to come up with long-term reforms.”
The Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service (C21) consists of public and private companies and industry associations representing newspapers, advertisers, catalogers, e-commerce, parcels, greeting cards, financial services, telecommunications, insurance, paper, printing, technology, envelope manufacturing, and mail services, which understand the essential role of USPS and want it sustained for the future. C21 broadly represents an industry generating $1.4 trillion in sales and supporting 7.5 million private sector jobs, and supports both versions of the Postal Reform Act (S. 2629/H.R.6076), which would stabilize USPS in the short-to-medium term.
Source: Business Community Responds to USPS Task Force Report – Postal Coalition
the farmers are going to receive more farm price SUBSIDIZIES. The Postal Service can’t receive any subsidizes from the tax payers, so says Das Fuhrer! So if the farmers must receive SUBSIDIZES from the tax payer, they must pre pay their health care costs! If the Postal Service must pre pay for health care, so must farmers!
I notice the 2018 Farm Bill passed and Das Fuhrer is going to sign the bill. Included in the bill every ones favorite part, farm price subsidizes for farmers. Don’t want to subsidize postal operations, or Postal employees health care costs. though nothing wrong with subsidizing farmers! Since farmers are subsidized make farmers pre pay their health care costs as Postal employees must!
There isn’t any logical reason why the Postal Service, and only the Postal service must pre fund health care costs! Force every other employer to pre fund health care costs. And as for everyone that pays for health care policies, they should pre fund their health care costs! If the Postal Service must pre pay so should everyone else. Pre funding health care costs is just an invented, manufactured, artificial, asinine way to strangle the Postal Service. And as for not wanting to “subsidize the Postal service” why must the tax payer subsidize people’s flood insurance, farmer’s soy beans, farmer’s other crops, the idea of tax payers paying higher taxes for school gun security, and the hand outs to businessmen? How have Das Fuhrer’s other ideas worked out? Not well1 So the rich received big tax cuts, more pollution in the air and water, more guns and deaths on the streets. just keep the train wreck coming.
The current legislation before Congress has not passed for the last 8 years. This Coalition likes it this way. No changes in cost to them. Meanwhile the Postal Service continues to go broke. The main reason Postal reform is going nowhere is due to making retiree’s being forced into Medicare. If Congress passed this legislation it would not be long before all federal employees would be required into Medicare. Effectively bankrupting Medicare. I don’t like everything in the Task Force recommendations, but it’s better than what this Coalition wants.
I’m so glad I left after 31 years of delivering, old school and newshool not compatible! Just sad that after 31 years the pension sucks
Same old mumbo jumbo from this Coalition and USPS Unions. Trump’s task force has come up with some good ideas. One of them is not forcing current retiree’s into Medicare.