[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 22 (Tuesday, February 12, 2013)]
[House]
[Page H436]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             THE CRISIS OF THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. I rise to speak about yet another phony, created crisis, 
and that would be the crisis of the United States Postal Service, which 
we have heard is hemorrhaging--hemorrhaging--money.
  Well, it's kind of interesting. If you look back since in 2006, 
Congress forced the United States Postal Service to prepay health care 
retirement benefits for people who have not yet been born who might 
some day go to work for the Postal Service. Now, if you had trouble 
following that, I'd understand it. No one else in America, no other 
business, no other agency of government, as far as I know, no entity in 
the world is prepaying the anticipated health care costs of people who 
haven't yet been born, let alone if they're a specific entity, people 
who haven't yet been born and might go to work for them some day and 
might retire and might then need health care, but we're making the 
Postal Service do that.
  Now, I'm not, but the Congress assembled deemed that, snuck it into 
one of those midnight special bills in a lame-duck session of Congress. 
So, now the hemorrhaging.
  Well, they're hemorrhaging money, hemorrhaging money. Oh, my God, we 
must do away with them. That's basically the Republican line here. 
They, so far, have done nothing to either unshackle the post office so 
it can deal with some of these problems, and, in fact, have encouraged 
the most destructive instincts of the idiot who is running the Postal 
Service, who should be fired by the President, to go to 5-day delivery 
and to close all the sorting centers.

                              {time}  1230

  Under the plan of the Postmaster General, it will take longer for a 
first-class letter to go from my town of Springfield across the river 
to the city of Eugene than it took Thomas Jefferson to mail a letter 
from Monticello to the Continental Congress. Yes, really, that's what 
he's planning. Now, that's not going to cause a bunch of people to 
abandon the Postal Service--of course not, that will help their 
revenue. No, it won't.
  With this benign neglect, the indifference, the refusal to act over 
here in the House, we're watching the Postal Service spiral down the 
drain, both the good and the bad of the Postal Service.
  If you didn't make them prepay health care retirement benefits for 
people who haven't yet been born, who haven't yet gone to work for 
them, over the last 6 years, instead of saying they lost 
$41,200,000,000, actually, it would come down to about $9 billion. They 
prepaid $32 billion of health care retirement benefits, $32 billion. 
That is by far the large majority of their red ink. Just about 80 
percent of their red ink is due to them being forced to do something 
that no other entity on Earth is being forced to do.
  If you want to look for a phony, manufactured crisis, this is it. 
Yes, they still have a small problem. That would be about a billion and 
a half dollars a year. If we unshackled them a bit, let them get into 
some new lines of business--which the Republicans are refusing to do--
if we allowed them to set rates rationally--they've got a couple of 
lines of business as they call them that make money, and they have 
others that lose money. But they're allowed only to increase rates--
even if it is losing money to deliver junk mail--by a cost-of-living 
increase, which it would obviously be less than a penny on junk mail 
delivery costs. The same on first-class.
  If we allowed them to set their rates reasonably, if we took away 
this mandate of prefunding retirement health care costs for people who 
haven't yet been born, who haven't yet gone to work for them, and if we 
settled up on the old dispute over their overpayment for the civil 
service retirees who got rolled into the FERS system with the Postal 
Service, actually we could have a viable entity and one that would 
continue to serve America into the next century.
  The post office pioneered optical scanning. They used to have some 
visionary leadership over there. They need new leadership. They need to 
be unshackled by Congress. They need to have unfair burdens lifted. But 
they don't need to be destroyed. That's where we're headed, towards the 
destruction of the Postal Service at this point in time. Some say young 
people don't use it, no one needs it, who needs it. They're delivering 
packages for FedEx and UPS to places where FedEx and UPS doesn't want 
to go. They've partnered with FedEx and UPS. They deliver packages for 
small businesses and with their one-price package that FedEx and UPS 
can't afford, which are vital to thousands of small businesses in my 
State and millions nationwide. They deliver prescriptions. Yes, they 
deliver prescriptions on Saturdays for veterans and others.
  We need to fix the Postal Service, not destroy it.

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