Lawmakers concede Postal Service overhaul unlikely before Nov. election

Lawmakers are conceding that an overhaul to the struggling Postal Service won’t be enacted before November’s elections – and that any reforms passed this year may not be as sweeping as originally sought.

With Congress set to skip town again in a few days, the House has yet to vote on its postal reform bill, despite suggesting it would it take it up over the summer. 

But at the same time, lawmakers working on postal issues are also trying to lay the groundwork to ensure at least something gets done on the issue during a post-election lame-duck session that will be both compressed and packed with pressing fiscal issues.

“We’ve been all along working on ideas that would be hybrids,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who introduced the House GOP postal bill. “We believe that at least some reform will get passed.”

House Republicans have acknowledged that one of the reasons for the current delay on postal reform is that it could be a tough vote for some of their conference, especially those members from more rural areas.

That comes as Democrats and Republicans in the chamber also continue to blame the other party for inaction, while key senators – who passed their own bipartisan postal bill in April – are criticizing the House for not moving. 

But Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said last week that he believes the GOP leadership would support bringing a postal bill to the floor after the election.

And though the California Republican has repeatedly bashed the Senate postal bill, Issa declared that he was already examining how to make changes to his bill to make it easier to come to a lame-duck agreement with the Senate. 

Issa added that he was less concerned about whether lawmakers would try to reach a final agreement in a traditional conference committee in the lame-duck than he was “with finding areas of agreement before we bring a bill to the floor.”

“Because it really doesn’t make sense at this late date to bring a bill unless it is effectively close to pre-conference,” said Issa, who also acknowledged that some tweaks would have been needed to his bill anyway, given that it passed out of the Oversight panel some 11 months ago.

The back-and-forth comes as the Postal Service lost more than $5 billion in the third quarter of fiscal 2012. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, who has said that USPS needs to cut $22.5 billion from its annual costs by 2016, has been calling for months for Congress to quickly finish up its work on postal reform. 

But the GOP bill authored by Issa and Rep. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) has some planks that have proven controversial, including paving the way for a control board that would be empowered to make cost-cutting decisions. Republicans say that the Senate bill delays or stands in the way of needed reforms.

Still, Issa already sent a letter to President Obama, urging him to push to include a provision scrapping Saturday delivery in the government spending bill the House passed last week. The White House has expressed support for five-day delivery in the past, but postal unions and some Democrats on the Hill have opposed that proposal.

In his letter, Issa also sounded open to giving USPS more relief from billions of dollars in prepayments for retiree healthcare, with the agency prepared to default on a $5.6 billion installment at the end of the month. The Postal Service already defaulted, for what is thought to be the first time, on a similar-sized prepayment to the government in August. 

Ross told The Hill last week that another possible area of compromise could be using an overpayment into a federal fund to entice postal workers to retire, the sort of provision that is already in the Senate bill. 

But even as groundwork is being laid, key lawmakers are still sounding annoyed about the pace of postal negotiations.

“I’m frustrated over it, for obvious reasons,” said Ross, one of the dozens of GOP freshmen who vowed to change how Washington operates. “It’s something we need to act on.”

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), one of the four sponsors of the Senate bill, has repeatedly urged the House to pass whatever postal measure they could, and allow the two chambers to sit down to hammer out a compromise. 

But Carper also sounded frustrated last week that Issa was trying to bring in the president, as the House continues to sit on its bill. 

“House leaders need to stop looking for short-cuts and do their job, so we can reform and preserve the Postal Service for future generations,” Carper said in a statement.

For his part, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat at House Oversight, said it was possible that no final deal on postal reform could emerge in the lame-duck, and that lawmakers might have to take the issue back up in 2013.

“I hope that does not happen,” said Cummings, who added that inaction by Congress was hampering industries that heavily use the mail system. “But I think, at the rate we’re going, that’s quite possible.”

House GOP leaders have suggested that part of the reason they had yet to move on postal reform is that USPS has so far been able to stay afloat.

But the agency has said it could face cash-flow issues next month, and outside observers continue to urge congressional action.

“It’s not just whether they can deliver the mail,” said Art Sackler, co-coordinator for the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service. “It’s also about how well, how fast and how the Postal Service can satisfy customers.”

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