House panel slogs through on postal reform bill

But Democrats, while saying they appreciated the bipartisan overtures, also continued to charge that Republicans were ramming through their Postal Service legislation. 

{mosads}“The underlying bill offered by the majority is fatally flawed,” said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat.

Lawmakers from the two parties also sparred over a Government Accountability Office report that cast doubt on a USPS assertion that it had dramatically overpaid into a federal retirement program, a claim that has sympathy from many Democrats. 

The two parties are in broad agreement on one large issue: The Postal Service, which lost as much as $10 billion last fiscal year and is expected to reach its $15 billion borrowing limit at the end of September, needs serious help as it tries to survive in the digital age.

But disputes, which don’t always break down on partisan lines, remain on key issues, such as whether to allow the Postal Service to scrap Saturday delivery and how to deal with the agency’s labor costs, which account for 80 percent of its expenses.

The House GOP bill looks to rein in USPS labor costs by, among other steps, installing an oversight board to recommend post office closures and loosening delivery requirements. 

Issa also reiterated Thursday that he wants to ease out perhaps as many as 200,000 postal employees who are approaching or are already fully vested into their retirement. 

Republicans also tweaked the bill at the markup, accepting an amendment that would allow USPS to eliminate delivery on an extra 12 days a year — instead of giving the Postal Service the authority to scrap Saturday delivery altogether. 

The amendment, from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), does allow USPS to ask to shift to five-day delivery six months after the enactment of the postal reform bill.

The committee also accepted proposals to push off any postal rate increases for unprofitable product classes for at least two years, in part because of concerns for the periodical industry, and to delay all but $1 billion of a $5.5 billion annual prepayment for retiree health care that USPS has until November to make. 

Democrats were agreeable to several GOP suggestions, including another that would essentially allow postal contractors to remain subject to Davis-Bacon wage requirements. 

But lawmakers in the party also have their own ideas on how to overhaul USPS, including allowing the agency to expand into areas like facility leasing. 

Democrats like Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) expressed concern about GOP ideas on reducing the Postal Service workforce, including the proposal to phase out retirement-eligible employees.

“Under normal circumstances — if we had a good economy, if their home values had been maintained, if their retirement, their thrift savings plan hadn’t lost so much value — yeah, they’d be ready to retire,” said Lynch, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight subcommittee that oversees USPS. “They are not.”

The Democratic proposal would instead use a $6.9 billion USPS overpayment into the Federal Employees Retirement System to transition 100,000 employees into retirement.

The Postal Service, backed by its own inspector general and private firms, has also said that it overpaid between $50 billion and $75 billion to another federal retirement program, the Civil Service Retirement System.

But the GAO report released Thursday said that trying to transfer billions of dollars from the federal government to USPS would be a significant policy change and shift an unfunded liability to taxpayers. 

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, one of the key congressional Democrats working on postal reform, responded to the report by saying that policymakers should currently concentrate on other potential areas of agreement.

But Oversight Democrats were less willing to accept the study’s findings.

“It’s an overpayment, whether they want to call it that or not,” Lynch said.

Republicans, meanwhile, asserted that lawmakers should stand by the findings, which were requested by a bipartisan group of officials. 

“In order to resolve this issue, we had to reach out to some agency or some institution that we would trust,” said Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.), another key sponsor of the House GOP bill.