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Get rid of a burdensome law. Congress could relieve the Postal Service of its obligation under a 2006 law to pre-fund decades’ worth of worker benefits, returning it to a more standard “pay as you go” model.
Can’t possibly be emphasized enough. Constantly!
Assuming ballot mail doesn’t get special treatment, once they’ve built up a 3 week backlog of undelivered mail, the backlog will remain a 3 week rolling delay until that backlog is cleared. That makes vote by mail unworkable for many states where the ballots are sent out too close to election day, and/or are required to be returned/postmarked by election day.
It also makes the USPS an extremely attractive privatization target, since you can raid that pre-paid pension to fund the takeover cost, and replace it with a traditional take-your-chances plan.
Yep, and all that property grandfathered in.
Let the House immediately pass a bill prioritizing ballots, prescription drugs, and paychecks.
Specify that advertising and junk mail be stockpiled until after the election, if necessary.
Then watch McConnell and GOP senators contemplate political suicide by opposing it.
The Post Office needs to survive Trump/McConnell/Repubs should be the headlines.
To be honest, I never considered the impact of the virus on the postal workers and how many of them would get sick and/or have to quarantine. Shame on me.
But then to hunker down and reduce hiring, I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous.
And yes, by all means, that burdensome law was passed by Gingrich and his cronies back in the 90s. Need to go, stat.
But that advertising mail is necessary to jump start the economy, and stockpiling GOP campaign materials would tilt the election toward sanity.
The pot is currently at $72 billion. Bet you could trouser more than half of that.
The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was enacted in 2006. It passed the House on a 410-20 vote with 201 Democrats voting in favor. It passed the Senate by unanimous consent.
The Act “dealt with retiree health benefits, not pensions.”
In 2012, the Government Accountability Office said the act “did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits over a 10-year period” but that the “payments would be projected to fund the liability over a period in excess of 50 years, from 2007 through 2056 and beyond.”
Regardless, Partenheimer [a spokesman for the Postal Service] told us that “the pre-funding requirement included in the 2006 law is a major reason for our financial situation, along with an outdated business model.”
Still needs to go - I just can’t remember what the rationale was for this 14 years ago that it wasn’t immediately shouted down by anyone with half a brain.
There were a whole bunch of articles from the usual think tank suspects about how the post office had $100 billion in unfunded liabilities, and wasn’t going to be able to pay retiree benefits. And I don’t think anyone really considered the possibility of the GOP that would want to destroy the USPS completely.
Well, I guess it’s time to re-think that possibility, huh?? 
Apparently Mark Meadows is now shopping the lie that DeJoy went rogue and acted entirely on his own without ever having talked to Current Occupant about what he was intending to do at USPS. 
I believe him, don’t you?
I think the past decade has shown we need to rethink the notion that one political party wouldn’t want to destroy the country rather than lose its graft.
No argument on that point.
From the APWU website, “Recognizing the problem prefunding creates, the US House of Representatives recently [Feb. 5, 2020] passed the USPS Fairness Act, H.R. 2382 with a sweeping bi-partisan vote of 309-106. The Senate, led by Senators Steve Daines (R-MT) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced identical legislation, S. 2965 on December 3, 2019. Both bills fully repeal the prefunding mandate and revert back to a pay-as you-go system that the postal Service used prior to PAEA.”
I can’t find any record of the Senate Bill ever being brought to the floor. What a surprise.
You mean those comments about not wanting to fund the post office because it would allow proper vote-by-mail were just coincidental? Like the comments about loyalty just before trump fired Comey? Sure, I believe that.
You just can’t trust those covfefe boys to act responsibly.
We’re about due for another underbussing; better wear your nice suit, deJoy. Remove the man but leave his damage in place.