“Hi! My name’s Darrell! I’m from Congress, and I’m here to help!”

Darrell Issa, the multimillionaire career politician, self-appointed “watchdog” and latter day tea party convert, recently used taxpayer dollars to create a web site called “savingthepostalservice.com”. Darrell’s idea of “saving” the USPS is to force the agency into bankruptcy, eliminate collective bargaining, and switch to a part time work force with low wages and no benefits. Darrell’s site doesn’t mention the Congressional mandates that are the real reason for the USPS’s current financial problems, so we’ve decided to provide that information here as a public service. Like the USPS, and unlike Darrell, we receive no taxpayer funds.

• First, some quick facts that you won’t find on Darrell’s web site:
• The US Postal Service doesn’t need or want a taxpayer bailout- it makes more than enough from revenue to pay for its operations
• So what’s the problem? Simple: the US Treasury is sitting on $42.5 billion in USPS profits under the guise of a so-called “trust fund” (source: USPS 2010 Annual Report, p. 77.)
• The USPS is facing a dramatic drop in volume due to competition from electronic diversion and the effects of the recession
• Despite that, the USPS has, by downsizing its workforce and infrastructure, and negotiating concessions from its unions, managed to match its expenses to its revenues- breaking even, just like it was designed to do.
• The ONLY reason the USPS is near bankruptcy is the skimming of over $5 billion a year in “trust fund payments” enacted by Congress and the Bush Administration in the 2006 PAEA law.
• Without PAEA, the USPS would still face a challenging future, but it would be facing it with ZERO debt, and a $15 billion credit line.
• Congress refuses to modify the trust fund requirement for one very simple, and very cynical reason: the “trust fund” is “on budget”, while the USPS is not. The trust funds don’t do anything to “guarantee” future retiree health benefits- they serve only to transfer some of the federal deficit to the USPS, artificially lowering the government’s accumulated debt.
• The USPS’s immediate problem isn’t the Internet or the unions- it’s the age old problem of politicians with their hands in the till
• Saving the postal service blog
  Daily updates on the phony postal “crisis”
• Postal Ponzi Scheme
  From 2009, our brief history of the so-called “prefunding” requirement that pushed the USPS to the brink of insolvency.
• How to Save the Postal Service Before It’s Too Late
  From the Save the Post Office blog, a summary of how Congress got us into this mess. See also “The Perfect Storm: How everything is coming together to take the Postal Service apart“.
• The Big Lie about postal ‘bankruptcy’
  From Fred Rolando, President of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
• Comarow on Issa’s postal bill: maybe ALL government agencies should have four boards overseeing them!
  Postal guru Murray Comarow, who was present at the creation of the USPS, having worked for both the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, was not impressed by Darrell’s “reform” bill.
• Postal Facts
  The NALC answers attacks on the USPS and its employees with the facts.

Red Book

Check back for updates as we try to keep an eye on the politicians and their plans to “save” the US Postal Service.