[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 135 (Friday, December 8, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11674-S11677]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
POSTAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND ENHANCEMENT ACT
Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, shortly, the Senate will consider H.R.
6407, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. As the Presiding
Officer is very well aware, since he has been a key player in molding
this important legislation, this postal reform legislation has been a
long time coming. And it is great news for the U.S. economy.
This legislation represents the culmination of a process that began
back in 2002 when a group of constituents came to me, sat down with me
in Maine, and taught me the importance of the Postal Service to the
viability of their businesses and to the employees they had.
This coalition of groups included a Maine catalog company, a paper
manufacturer, a printer, a local financial services company, and a
publisher. They all came together and it was from them that I learned
just how vital the Postal Service is to our economy.
So shortly after that meeting in the summer of 2002, I introduced a
bill to establish a Presidential commission charged with examining the
problems of the Postal Service and charged with developing specific
recommendations and legislative proposals that the Congress and the
Postal Service could implement.
The President appointed the members of the commission. They worked
very hard. They came up with an excellent report which provided, in
many ways, the basis for the landmark legislation that I believe we
will finally clear tonight.
During the next 4 years, the Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee, which I had been privileged to chair, worked very
hard to craft the most sweeping changes in the U.S. Postal Service in
more than 30 years.
Senate passage of this legislation will help the 225-year-old Postal
Service meet the challenges of the 21st century.
As a Senator representing a large rural State, I want to ensure that
my constituents, whether they live in the northern woods or on our
islands or in our many small rural communities, have the same access to
Postal Services as the people of our cities. If the Postal Service were
no longer to provide universal service and deliver mail to every
customer, the affordable communications link upon which many Americans
rely would be jeopardized. Most commercial enterprises would find it
uneconomical, if not impossible, to deliver mail and packages to rural
Americans at the affordable rates charged by the Postal Service.
But for several years now, the Postal Service has clung to the edge
of an abyss. Under the business model in which it has been forced to
operate, the Postal Service has been at great financial risk. In fact,
the Government Accountability Office aptly describes it as a potential
death spiral in which escalating rates lead to lower volume, which in
turn leads to even higher rates, which in turn causes the Postal
Service to lose more business.
The Postal Service faces the challenge of the electronic age. It also
has been saddled with more than $90 billion in unfunded liabilities and
obligations, which has included debt to the Treasury, nearly $7 billion
to workers' comp claims, $5 billion for retirement costs, and as much
as $45 billion to cover retiree health care costs. The Comptroller
General of the United States, David Walker, has cited these figures to
point to the urgent need for ``fundamental reforms to minimize the risk
of a significant taxpayer bailout for a dramatic postal rate
increase.'' And it is telling, indeed, that the Postal Service has been
on GAO's high-risk list since April of 2001.
With this landmark reform legislation, we will put the Postal Service
on a firm financial footing. We endorse the principle of universal
service, of affordable, predictable postal rates. This legislation will
modernize the Postal Service's rate-setting process and provide much-
needed rate predictability for postal customers. Without this reform,
postal ratepayers would have faced billions of dollars in higher--much
higher--rates over the next several years.
The 750,000 career employees of the Postal Service often labor
without anyone really knowing who they are, but their efforts play an
absolutely essential role in the American economy. The Postal Service
is the linchpin of a $900 billion mailing industry that employs 9
million people in fields as diverse as direct mailing, printing,
catalog companies, paper manufacturing, publishing, and financial
services. The health of the Postal Service, therefore, is essential to
the vitality of thousands of companies and the millions of employees
they serve.
This bill represents years of hard work. As chairman of the committee
with jurisdiction, I held a series of eight hearings, including a joint
hearing with our House colleagues, during which we reviewed the
recommendations of the President's commission and we heard from a wide
range of experts and stakeholders, including representatives of the
postal employees unions, the Postal Service itself, administration
officials, mailers, the postmasters, postal supervisors, publishers--a
wide variety of groups. In fact, there is a broad coalition supporting
this bill, including many nonprofit mailers, which rely on affordable
postal rates.
There are many people who have worked very hard to craft the very
delicate compromise that is before us tonight. I particularly thank
Senators Carper, Coleman, and Lieberman for
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their assistance but also our House colleagues. I will have more to say
about them later.
The compromise legislation before the Senate replaces the current
lengthy and litigious rate-setting process with a rate cap-based
structure for products such as first class mail, periodicals, and
library mail. For 10 years, the price changes for market-dominant
products like these will be subject to a 45-day prior review period by
the Postal Regulatory Commission. The Postal Service will have much
more flexibility, but the rates will be capped at the CPI. That is an
important element of providing 10 years of predictable, affordable
rates, which will help every customer of the Postal Service plan.
After 10 years, the Postal Regulatory Commission will review the rate
cap and, if necessary, and following a notice and comment period, the
Commission will be authorized to modify or adopt an alternative system.
While this bill provides for a decade of rate stability, I continue
to believe that the preferable approach was the permanent flexible rate
cap that was included in the Senate-passed version of this legislation.
But, on balance, this bill is simply too important, and that is why we
have reached this compromise to allow it to pass. We at least will see
a decade of rate stability, and I believe the Postal Rate Commission,
at the end of that decade, may well decide that it is best to continue
with a CPI rate cap in place. It is also, obviously, possible for
Congress to act to reimpose the rate cap after it expires. But this
legislation is simply too vital to our economy to pass on a decade of
stability. The consequences of no legislation would be disastrous for
the Postal Service, its employees, and its customers.
Among other highlights of the compromise, the bill will reform the
Postal Service workers' compensation system to require a 3-day waiting
period. This is consistent with every State workers' compensation
program. The bill introduces new safeguards against unfair competition
by the Postal Service in competitive markets, prohibits subsidization
of competitive products by market-dominant products, and requires an
allocation of institutional costs to competitive products.
I note that we looked at competitive issues with UPS and FedEx, and I
think we have come up with the right balance here. The bill transforms
the existing Postal Rate Commission into the Postal Regulatory
Commission with enhanced authority to ensure that there is greater
oversight of the Postal Service as its management assumes greater
responsibility.
The bill reaffirms postal employees' rights to collectively bargain.
It changes the bargaining process only in small ways and only in ways
that have been agreed to by both the Postal Service and the four major
unions.
Another significant provision amends the current law to essentially
free up $78 billion over 6 years. This is a complicated issue. It has
to do with the responsibility for paying for the military retirement
credits of postal employees and also money that was put into an escrow
account to compensate for an overpayment into the civil service
retirement system. These savings will be used to pay off debt to the
U.S. Treasury, to fund health care liabilities, and to mitigate future
rate increases.
This compromise is not perfect and, indeed, earlier tonight, there
were issues raised by the appropriators--legitimate issues--that
threatened at one point to derail the bill again. It has been a
delicate compromise to satisfy all of the competing concerns. Everyone
has had to compromise, but I think we have come up with a good bill.
This compromise will help ensure a strong financial future for the U.S.
Postal Service and the many sectors of our economy that rely on its
services, and it reaffirms our commitment to the principle of universal
service that I believe is absolutely vital to this institution.
Finally, there are so many people both within Congress, within the
administration, and among the stakeholders who have worked very hard to
bring this legislation to a successful conclusion. I cannot name them
all, but I want to name some of them.
Senator Carper and his staffer, John Kilvington, have been here every
step of the way. Senator Carper was the original cosponsor of the bill
and has worked very hard to bring the compromise about.
Senators Lieberman, Coleman, Akaka, and Voinovich also have played
very important roles.
Our leaders, Senator Frist and Senator Reid, have been vitally
interested and have helped us get this job done.
In the House, Chairman Tom Davis and the ranking Democrat Henry
Waxman of the Government Reform Committee, also worked hard to produce
a bill and to work with us to bring about the compromise.
A true hero of this effort, a person who worked on postal issues for
a decade, is Congressman John McHugh.
The administration has played an absolutely critical role in bringing
us to where we are today. The administration often doesn't get credit
for that, and they deserve credit. They have worked with us to come up
with solutions on the financial issues in this bill, and without the
strong support of the administration, we would not be here tonight.
I want to particularly salute OMB Director Rob Portman; Michael Bopp,
my former staff director, who is now working at OMB and brought his
expertise to bear on this issue; Jess Sharp and Candi Wolff of the
White House staff; and of course the staff of the Postal Service
itself, which was always there with expertise, particularly Kim Weaver.
But most of all, I thank Ann Fisher of my staff, who has worked for
years on this bill. This has been an issue which has meant a great deal
to her, and she has been working on postal issues for a long time. She
is a recognized expert, and without her expertise, we would not be here
tonight.
I finally also want to thank the committee's new staff director,
Brandon Milhorn, for bringing his judgment to bear on this issue.
There are so many people who have worked so hard, but the collective
effort of everyone has produced a bill of which we can be proud.
It is not a perfect bill, but I am convinced it will put the U.S.
Postal Service on a sound financial footing for years to come.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I concur with many of the remarks the
Senator from Maine has made. She has listed a host of people who played
critical roles in the adoption of the legislation, hammering out a
difficult compromise over the last 4 years. I salute her for her
leadership and thank her for her leadership.
I especially say thank you to Ann Fisher, who has served for Senator
Collins and really for us, for the great work she has done in the
course of this effort.
I have been blessed with my own staff and a young man named John
Kilvington from New Castle, DE, who came here with me 6 years ago and
became an expert of his own with respect to postal reform, and has
worked long and hard, even into this night, to bridge our differences
and to get us over one last hurdle.
There is a reason why we only do postal reform once every 36 years,
and the reason is that it is tough to do. There are so many competing
interests--mailers large and small in areas rural and urban, the labor
unions involved trying to do their best to represent hundreds of
thousands of postal employees; there are competitors, UPS and FedEx,
that didn't exist a number of years ago.
In fact, if you go back in time to 1970 when the current business
model for the Postal Service was created by then junior Senator Ted
Stevens, who today is our President pro tempore and one of the most
senior Senators in the Senate, he provided the leadership in 1970 to
create the U.S. Postal Service.
At the time and for many years thereafter, it was the right business
model for providing postal service to the people of this country. But a
lot has changed since 1970. In 1970, I was a lieutenant JG on the other
side of the world in Southeast Asia the year the Postal Service, as we
know it, was born.
One of the things different--I think of the current war that many of
our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are waging--in the Vietnam
war, we didn't have any e-mails. We had mail call. It was one of the
highlights of our day every day. We had no cell phones
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with which to communicate with our loved ones. We had no bank by phone.
We had no electronic banking. Direct deposits were new. There was no
such thing as a FedEx or UPS to provide the kind of competition the
Postal Service faces today, and no threat of anthrax in the mail.
The world has changed dramatically, and also the way that we exchange
information, the way we communicate with one another has changed
dramatically, too. The Postal Service needs to change as well. With the
adoption of this legislation, it will.
I extend my heartfelt thanks to our colleagues in the House of
Representatives with whom we have served and worked on this challenge,
particularly Congressman McHugh who led the fight for a decade or more,
Congressman Davis who chairs the relevant committee in the House, and
also Congressman Henry Waxman, with whom I served years ago in the
House, entered the fray and helped, along with Congressman Davis and
others, to get us to the finish line.
I don't want to belabor what this bill does or does not do, but it
acknowledges this is not 1970 anymore; this is 2006. We will still have
universal delivery for the mail. We will still receive that mail 6 days
a week. The Postal Service will still be expected, when somebody builds
a new house or starts a new business, to deliver mail to those places.
I am told during the course of the year at least a million new
customers come online for the Postal Service, and the Postal Service
will be there through rain, sleet, and snow to deliver the mail to all
those customers.
The Postal Service under the legislation we have is going to act more
like a business. They will have an opportunity to price their products
more competitively and overall can put together a whole slew of postal
products. Overall, the price of those products cannot go up in a given
year by more than the rate of inflation, but individual products can.
Product A can go up more than product B and product C more than product
D. Over the next 10 years, the overall increase in the cost of postal
products can rise above the cost of living. That will provide a measure
of stability to the huge industry that relies on the post office and a
good postal service.
For those who compete with the Postal Service--and there are very
strong and good competitors; UPS and FedEx are among those--they will
have the opportunity to continue to compete, but I think they will be
on a playing field that is a bit more level where the first-class mail
the Postal Service will continue to enjoy a monopoly on will not be
able to underwrite the cost of their competitive products with
companies such as UPS and FedEx.
One of the things I am happiest about--and I give Senator Collins the
credit on this for convincing the administration to agree on two
points: One, folks who served in the military to come to work in the
Postal Service and eventually earn a postal pension. The mailers,
people who buy stamps, mailers large and small shouldn't have to pay
for the military service that later accrues to those same individuals
when they retire from the Postal Service. It is not fair to the
mailers. It is not fair to the public. Those costs should be borne by
the Treasury, and under this bill they will be.
And secondly, for many years folks thought the Postal Service was
underpaying its pension costs for its employees. A couple years ago the
Office of Personnel Management did a study and found that rather than
underpaying pension obligations, they are overpaying, and if they
continue at the rate they are going, they will be making a big
overpayment in the years to come.
This legislation corrects that situation. It says that in the future,
the Postal Service, 10 years out, will have access to a fair amount of
money that would have gone into overpayments. In the meantime, a lot of
money is going to be used to pay down the unamortized cost of health
care. Tens of billions of costs will be paid off, and that will put the
Postal Service in stronger financial shape going forward.
Lastly, I want to mention the administration. I know Senator Collins
has as well. In the negotiations that lasted for years on this
legislation, the administration, particularly in the last weeks,
especially played a constructive role. I single out among those Michael
Bopp, who previously served on the staff for Senator Collins, and his
help was critical, as was that of Rob Portman and a number of others in
the administration.
Our people said this is perfect legislation. I am not aware of any
perfect legislation I have been associated with. This was a hard one to
put together. My dad used to say that the hardest things to do are the
things that are worth doing. If that is any indication, this is
something worth doing. I am grateful to all who played a part.
The hour is late, about 2:20 in the morning. I am ready to call it a
day, and I know we will have other business to do.
Again I thank my colleagues, those within the mailing public, the
Postal Service, Jack Porter, our Postmaster General, and all who worked
to get us to this point in time, and particularly to Patty Murray who
worked with us tonight to get past a real tough spot.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, while the chairman of the Governmental
Affairs Committee is on the floor, I want to say congratulations,
through the Chair, to her for a tremendous success on the Postal
Accountability and Enforcement Act which will be passed shortly. It was
a tremendous accomplishment and one she and I have been in touch with a
lot by e-mails in the middle of the night, as it came to my mind how
important this particular bill is. I will say a few remarks about that.
I did want to congratulate her for a tremendous success on a bill
people said was impossible to pass, and 6 months ago people said it was
impossible to pass, and a month ago people said it was going to be a
challenge, and even 3 days ago saying it was a challenge. But in a
bipartisan way coming together, bicameral--the House and Senate--it is
a tremendous accomplishment.
For more than 225 years, America's postal system has kept Americans
connected. We depend on the Postal Service to keep in touch with family
and friends, to send birthday greetings, ship care packages--and a
little taste of home--to our students, pay the bills, and even to learn
we might win a million dollars if we act right now.
The U.S. Postal Service operates on a single, deep-rooted principle:
Every person in the United States--no matter who, no matter where--has
the right to equal access to secure, efficient, and affordable mail
service.
Today, that translates into serving 7.5 million customers daily in
over 37,000 post offices, providing stamps at more than 27,800 vending
machines, nearly 25,500 commercial retail outlets, nearly 15,300
banking and credit union ATMs, and 2,500 automated postal centers, and
delivering 212 billion pieces of mail annually to over 144 million
homes, businesses, and post office boxes in virtually every city and
town in the country.
But the Postal Service we know today is vastly different than our
ancestors knew 225 years ago or even 75 years ago or 50 years ago.
Before there were ZIP codes and mail carriers with home delivery
routes--before Priority Mail and Express Mail, before air mail--the
Postal Service was an informal network that kept settlers and colonists
in touch with each other and their homelands.
The U.S. Postal Service's history is a story of transformation from
the steamboats and the pony express in the 19th century, to delivery
confirmation and online package tracking of the 21st century.
But in order for the Postal Service to take the next step, in order
for the Postal Service to continue delivering on the promise of its
fundamental operating principle, Congress must act, and tonight we will
do just that.
The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act enables the Postal
Service to maintain its competitive edge. It streamlines the rate-
setting process for market-dominant products,
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such as first-class mail, periodicals, and library mail.
It removes the redtape and increases the efficiency of the rate-
setting process by granting new authorities to the Postal Regulatory
Commission and the Postal Service Board of Governors.
It introduces new safeguards against unfair competition by the Postal
Service in competitive markets. It transforms the Postal Rate
Commission into the Postal Regulatory Commission and grants the new
body enhanced authorities to ensure appropriate oversight of postal
management.
It ensures increased financial transparency by requiring the Postal
Service to file certain financial disclosure forms in detailed annual
reports.
It reaffirms USPS employees' right to collectively bargain by
instituting changes already agreed upon by the Postal Service and the
four major unions.
It brings continuation of payrolls into lines already established by
every State's workers compensation program, and it increases the
fairness of USPS employees' pension benefits.
This bill is comprehensive in the scope and depth of the reforms it
institutes. But these changes are necessary and essential to helping
the U.S. Postal Service continue its more than 225 years of reliable
and efficient mail service. I once again congratulate Chairman Susan
Collins, and I do thank my colleagues for joining me in supporting this
very important measure.
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