USA TODAY Editorial: …The plan to end Saturday delivery in August, announced Wednesday, would cut costs by $2 billion a year. (Package delivery, which is thriving, would continue six days a week.) This is one of many steps postal officials have been begging Congress for years to allow them to take to stop the service from hemorrhaging money. Yet even though polls show almost 70% of Americans are OK with giving up Saturday mail delivery to help save the Postal Service, Congress has repeatedly objected, attaching provisions to spending bills to prohibit postal officials from acting on their own.
That might be fine if the House and Senate had a broad plan for saving national mail delivery. But they don’t. Year after year, postal officials sound the alarm and beg for a comprehensive bill to allow the agency to save money. But year after year, Congress dawdles, unwilling to do one of its most basic jobs. Last year, for example, Republican House leaders asserted they just couldn’t find the time to bring a Postal Service reorganization bill to the floor, at the same time they were scheduling their 33rd vote to repeal ObamaCare.
The nation’s mail delivery system is in deep trouble. Last year, it posted a net loss of $15.9 billion. Although most of that came from various prepayments for retiree benefits, the core business is also deeply in the red thanks to continuing steep declines in first-class mail. Something has to change. And fast… (more)
EDITOR: Congress doesn’t have the guts to offend postal workers. We surmise that congressional leaders have simply whispered to the postal authorities to “Just do it”. That way no vote needs to be taken.
Did Congress vote for the postal system to give Lance Armstrong $40 million?