Reforms needed at Postal Service

The Washington Post and The New York Times, in March 2 editorials, advise Congress how to avoid a collapse at the U.S. Postal Service. Both call for more management flexibility; but neither grasps that more fundamental change is needed. Calls for a new business model have come from members of Congress, most mailers, and the Postal Service itself.

The model favored by the Postal Service is a self-supporting government entity, which it is today, but with more flexibility. More flexibility would be achieved by a dozen changes in the law. None of these, however, would change the business model. If the Postal Service is to comply with Congress' lip-service demand that it behave like a business, it requires substantial control over prices and wages.

It has only marginal control over wages. As to prices, the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act created a Postal Rate Commission with great, but not absolute, authority over postal rates. The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) renamed it the Postal Regulatory Commission and gave it more power.

The bizarre result: The Postal Service is directed by nine presidentially appointed governors. They select the postmaster general and Deputy PMG. The PRC is composed of five presidentially appointed commissioners. The Board of Governors had unanimously warned Congress that if it enacted PAEA, it would not be able to manage the entity. Congress ignored the governors.

Layering one group of five presidential appointees over a group of nine presidential appointees would make any objective student of government break out into hives. The Postal Service and its customers, however, lack the political will to recommend to Congress that the PRC be phased out, and that wages be taken out of an arbitrator's hands and placed in the hands of management, subject to legislative guidelines. They won't propose laws they believe have little or no chance of enactment. That point of view is self-defeating.

The 2006 law requires the Government Accountability Office to present its views on a new business model; GAO's target date is April 12, well before the statute's deadline.

I have argued that, with or without customer support, the Board of Governors should seize the initiative by recommending changes before GAO acts, but unfortunately, all the indicators say that's not going to happen.

— Murray Comarow, Bethesda, Md.