Pass H.R. 1351 \"United States

¶ … Pass H.R. 1351 "United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011"

It is no secret that the local post office is in trouble. The Postmaster General is claiming that the U.S. Postal Service is in peril of financial collapse. The current proposal on the table is to close thousands of post offices and postal facilities, reduce services like Saturday delivery, and lay off workers, modify benefit programs, and end protection against layoffs. H.R. 1351, the United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011, would start to solve part of the dilemma by requiring the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to move the billions of dollars in overpayments to the retirement funds to the retiree health benefits account (O'Farrell, 2011).

H.R. 1351 has been proposed to modify the requirements of title 5, United States Code, involving the method for calculating the quantity of any Postal surplus or supplemental liability under the Civil Service Retirement System, and for other purposes. Basically this bill would require the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to figure out the amount of any surplus or liability as of the close of the most recently ending fiscal year using the method necessary under this Act and if the outcome is an excess, to move the surplus amount to the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund within fifteen days after the determination of an excess (H.R. 1351: United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011, 2011).

Reasons for Passage

Currently the USPS is controlled by an exclusive legal burden to pre-fund future retiree health benefits, artificially stripping billions each year from their operational budget. The Postal Service would really be in the black if not for this burdensome mandate, which even covers retiree health benefits of future workers and has no equivalent in either the federal segment or private enterprise. At the same time, the USPS is in fact owed somewhere between fifty billion and seventy five billion for historic pension overpayments. This enormous treasure was funded entirely by postage rate-payers and contributions from postal employees.

HR 1351 provides a reasonable solution to the pension overpayment and retiree health pre-funding loads. And it does so without using a single tax dollar. It requires a definitive recalculation of the Postal Service's Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) pension account balance. It then commands any resulting excess be transferred to the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund (PSRHBF). This legislation also foresees that fairly calculating the true value of billions in postal pension overpayments, employing systematic, dynamic, state-of-the-art actuarial methods, will take time. So it also provides short-term relief to the USPS in 2011 by permitting the agency to use an existing surplus in its Federal Employees' Retirement System (FERS) account to cover the 2011 retiree health pre-funding payment. In the end this is their own money from postal receipts and employee contributions this is being redistributed, not tax dollars being used (What's your position on H.R. 1351, 2011).

Opposing Reasons for Non-Passage

Those that oppose the passage of this bill feel that the U.S. Postal Service, and its accompanying pension liabilities, should be privatized and sold to the highest bidder. Some feel that this is a union backed bailout and that the union has no interest in protecting the American tax payer. These people feel that the USPS should be left to sink or swim and that if they fail this would be the beginning of government employee reduction. Other believe that it has been proven that things cannot go on the way they are ultimately, far-reaching changes are essential for survival.

Rebuttal to Reasons for Non-Passage

The passage of HR 1351 is a good first step in enabling the USPS to survive. The current crisis is basically a result of HR 6407. In 2006, the United States Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA). This bill required that the USPS prepay its potential health care benefit payments to retirees for the next seventy five years in a ten-year time span. The deep hole of debt that is presently facing the USPS is completely due to the burdensome prepayments for future retiree health care benefits imposed by Congress in this act (Nader, 2011).

Congress is in the end responsible for making this mess and thus must be the ones to fix it. Without swift Congressional action on this just and sensible measure, the United States Postal Service along with it the communities it binds and the over one trillion economy it fosters directly are in serious jeopardy. Make no mistake, this cannot realistically be mislabeled a bailout since all the funds are already there and not a dime came from taxes. And at the end of the day, this targeted understanding is fundamental for the maximizing of successful operational efficiencies already in progress.