The Postal Service is losing $25 million a day and needs to cut $22.5 billion in costs by 2016. The House still will fail to pass postal reform before the August recess.
The House bill would, according to The Hill, “implement a BRAC-style panel that would recommend a plan for cutting costs, and open the door for a control board to take over for postal management, if USPS fails to meet its obligations for 30 days.”
Mindful of concerns of those in rural areas, the House bill will also have a proposal that would “ensure that no more than 5 percent of post office closures in a given year would come from rural areas.”
The Senate has already passed a Postal reform bill that would “reduce the strain of the roughly $5.5 billion in annual retiree prepayments and use a federal pension overpayment to help ease postal workers into retirement” but would “also keep postal officials from scrapping Saturday delivery for at least two years, while the House bill would allow USPS to move more quickly on that front.”
In any event, there are many points of disagreement between the Senate bill and the proposed House bill, so the sooner the House passes the reform bill the quicker the conferees can hammer out an agreement that reforms an industry in dire financial straits.
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