Postal Dispatch

Just when it looks like the U.S. Postal Service is gonna remain perpetually insolvent and people are pulling out their hair about what to do about it, the USPS Inspector General comes out with a report saying the USPS overpaid its Civil Service Retirement System pension obligations for retired employees by $75 billion over nearly 40 years.

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In a recent article, Newsweek magazine polled some management consultants and business futurists on how to improve the U.S. Postal Service and make it run more like a business www.newsweek.com/id/216741. This assumes that “running like a business” is the ideal goal instead of providing probably the only government service that people still trust.

Granted, some of their ideas were not bad and may deserve serious consideration. But many others revealed a lack of understanding about why the USPS is in the mess it’s in, the legal obstacles it faces and how much the $9 billion direct marketing industry depends on it.

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President Barack Obama signed a measure last week to give the U.S Postal Service $4 billion worth of breathing room for the next year. The measure just barely got through, according to some reports.

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In the latest move to help forestall financial Armageddon, the U.S. Postal Service and Mailers Technical Advisory Committee have decided to poll business mailers on how they’d feel about cutting back delivery to five days.

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The Washington Post this week editorialized that the U.S. Postal Service must take radical steps to survive in the 21st Century. It pointed to the USPS’s ever-worsening financial state and the fact that everything is moving online.

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The mailers groups and other interests which fought tirelessly for 11 years for a reform law that would tie future postage increases to the rate of inflation (as determined by the Consumer Price Index) may have outsmarted themselves, big time.

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