NAPS President Atkins Responds to Issa’s comments- 09.29.10

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STATEMENT OF NAPS PRESIDENT LOUIS ATKINS
ON COMMENTS BY REP. DARRELL ISSA

I know I speak for all NAPS members when I say how
disappointed I was with an opinion piece written by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-
CA) that appeared in the Washington Times (“Time for Another
Government Bailout,” Sept. 20, 2010).

Issa’s commentary depicts postal legislation pending in Congress
as a “government bailout” of the Postal Service. Regrettably, his claim is
totally inaccurate.

In recent months, NAPS has called on Congress to enact two
much-needed reforms. The first would calculate how much the Postal
Service should receive for the billions of dollars in civil service pension
overpayments it made to the U.S. Treasury over several decades. The
second would permit the agency to use those overpayments to prefund
future retiree health insurance costs.

In July, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), chair of the postal oversight
subcommittee, responsibly introduced legislation to set in motion the
overpayment calculation process and intra-governmental funds transfer.
The measure is called the “United States Postal Service’s CSRS
Obligation Modification Act of 2010” (H.R. 5746). Lynch’s postal panel
promptly approved the legislation before the August recess.

H.R. 5746 would provide a fair and reasonable way to deal with a
difficult problem involving a huge government mistake costing billions of
dollars, but, more importantly, not costing taxpayers a dime. Many
experts agree the Postal Service, which is required by federal law to
operate like a commercial business, was wrongly directed by the Civil
Service Commission and its successor, the Office of Personnel
Management, to make excessive pension contributions for many years.
The payments were far more than either federal law or modern business
standards required.

Reimbursing those overpaid Treasury funds—possibly as much as
$55 billion—to the Postal Service is the fair and just thing to do. This
isn’t a case of the Postal Service bellyaching about having to comply with
a federal requirement. You can bet any private-sector company that
suffered the same wrong under federal duress would seek corrective legal
relief.

Federal law prohibits the Postal Service from seeking help from the
courts in this matter. The agency can look only to Congress to make
things right by mandating Treasury to give back the overpaid funds.

That brings me back to Issa’s description of such relief for the Postal
Service as a “government bailout.” Clearly, this is not a bailout. Yes, the
reimbursement involves a payout from the Treasury, but those funds
never rightfully belonged to the Treasury. Every dollar returned to the
Postal Service would be a dollar originally paid with postage proceeds—
money paid to the Postal Service by mailers, not taxpayers!

As Issa knows, the Postal Service’s poor financial health stems from
several sources. The main source, of course, is the statutory requirement
that much too aggressively requires the Postal Service to make multi-
billion-dollar prefunding payments for pension obligations far into the
future. The favorable timing of a windfall for the Postal Service by using
just proceeds to ensure a stronger future for our country’s mail service is
a win-win for the American people. And, as you know, that would be an
outcome rarely seen in government these days.

Issa intends to be a reformer. In many respects, that’s a good thing.
But reform is precisely why he should support legislation to modify the
Postal Service’s pension obligations. Passage of the measure would
provide financial stability to the Postal Service now and for the near-term.

Passage would give Issa and his colleagues in Congress time to
craft legislation to help transform the Postal Service to serve America’s
needs, perhaps in totally new ways in the Internet Age, and still bind the
nation together.


Louis Atkins
NAPS President