Postal worker groups push back on USPS recommendations

Representatives for postal employees are set to push back at proposals to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service at a Senate hearing Tuesday afternoon.

In his prepared testimony, Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, slams USPS for wanting to end Saturday delivery and shed thousands of workers, among other things.

“The Postal Service, having been engaged in several years of cost cutting, has become like the man whose only tool is a hammer,” Guffey says in testimony obtained by The Hill and to be delivered before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. “To him, everything looks like a nail.”

The testimony comes as Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has indicated that the service will not be able to make a $5.5 billion prepayment for retiree health benefits that is due at the end of the month.

Donahoe is also scheduled to testify at Tuesday’s hearing, where, according to news reports, he will say that USPS could lose as much as $10 billion this fiscal year and might have only about a month’s worth of cash left.

In recent weeks and months, the Postal Service has also proposed closing up to 3,700 local branches and stopping payment into a federal retirement program, moves that Louis Atkins of the National Association of Postal Supervisors calls “self-destructive and premature” in his prepared Tuesday testimony.

“They will cause the irreversible decline of the Postal Service and the quality of its service, eliminate thousands of jobs at great cost to the economy and wreak havoc on communities across America,” Atkins adds.

Atkins and Guffey do agree with Donahoe that Congress needs to take swift action to help USPS, and support examinations into how much the service may have overpaid into federal retirement programs. The two men also do not believe USPS should have to pay the $5.5 billion healthcare payment.

Still, Donahoe says even more needs to be done to get the service back on sound financial footing. Meanwhile, four bills that have been introduced in Congress — from Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) — all have at least somewhat different takes on the best path forward for the Postal Service.