Issa has clearly run a successful business where profit is the goal, but he has never been the head of a public service where the goal is to provide a service where the income matches the expenses.
If Issa wants to apply business criteria to running the USPS he should first look at what expenses can be deleted without disrupting the service.
The first thing Issa as a businessperson would do is to work on getting the Postal Accountable and Enhancement Act rescinded. This would delete the USPS debt by 5.5 a year, a goodly chunk of cash by anyone’s standards. In 2006 the PAEA ,signed by Bush, mandated that the USPS fund 75 years of retiree health benefits in 10. Issa should have pointed out that the USPS was solvent until the PAEA (HR6407) was passed and that the USPS would be able to meet it’s expenses if this law was rescinded.
The second thing he would do , as a businessperson, would be to campaign to retrieve overpayments the USPS has made to the Civil Service Retirement Service.
The third thing he would do, along with step one and two, would be to retrieve overpayments the USPS made to FERS.
The fourth step would be to charge more for delivering UPS parcels that UPS has the Post Office deliver to places they don’t.
Issa,as a businessman, would also look at the ratio of managers to workers, and see if some adjustments should be made.
But Issa, in HR2309 hasn’t proposed that any of these things that would put the USPS back on an even Keel.
Issa’s solution to cut the workforce by at least 100,000. Issa’s solution is to weaken the unions, whose members are prohibited from striking by law, so that their wages and benefits would ultimately depend on a separate board if a contract wasn’t agreed upon by the USPS and a union.
This is a case where Issa’s cure would cause the death of the USPS as a public service and have it revived as a business with lower paid workers, higher rates and less service.
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