House subcommittee pushes forward GOP plan to repair USPS

Thursday - 9/22/2011, 6:44am EDT

Emily Kopp, reporter, Federal News Radio

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Partisan bickering over what to do with more than 100,000 surplus postal employees overshadowed a House subcommittee's approval of a bill to overhaul the ailing Postal Service.


"Eighty percent of the Postal Service's costs is labor," said Issa.



Subcommittee Democrats accused the bill's sponsors of trying to weaken organized labor.

"The agenda is to break the back of public employee unions," said Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.).


"The last thing we want to be doing is destroying jobs and putting people in a worse situation, unable to provide for families," he said at a press conference to announce his bill.


"This is subject to market fluctuations over time which is why, actuarially, at any given time, that is not actually what is or is not the unfunded liability of a retirement system," said Ross. "I think there's a more creative way to approach incentivizing, and that's through a collateralized loan option."



President Barack Obama proposed earlier this week his plan to help the Postal Service. Like the Issa-Ross bill, the White House would let the Postal Service reduce delivery to five days a week, but it also would return the FERS money to the agency so that it could offer early retirement packages. He has asked the "supercommittee" that is working on a plan to lower the federal deficit to include his ideas in its legislation.



House lawmakers to square off over plans to fix USPS