WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators will announce plans to reform and bring savings to the United States Postal Service tomorrow, November 2 at 11:30am. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Maine, Federal Financial Management Subcommittee Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., and Ranking Member Scott Brown, R-Mass., will unveil their compromise agreement to pull the USPS from the brink of financial failure.
When:
Wednesday, November 2, 11:30 a.m.
Update: Postcom.org has posted some details of what the bill will contain
The following are just some of the details that have been reported regarding tomorrow’s announcement of a Senate bi-partisan approach to postal reform:
- Returning the FERS overpayment to USPS; although the bill will set no numbers around how much of it has to be used for buyouts, that will be one of the goals to help incent, through added service credits or up to the federal limit of $25K per worker, 100,000 workers to retire over the next three years;
- No rate increases; underwater classes, not products, will have the same delay and study as in the Ross/Maloney Amendment in the House bill;
- Retiree health prefunding will be foregone for one year, and then reamortized for forty, saving USPS approximately $5B/yr
- Workers comp will be fixed across the face of the federal government to transition those well beyond retirement into pensions
- Saturday delivery changes will have a two-year moratorium, followed by a study by GAO on true savings in the wake of downsizing that will be further reviewed by the PRC for a final decision
- A process would be created to close facilities with a notice and comment period
- Arbitrators in postal labor negotiations would be required to consider the financial health of the USPS in any decision
- No BRAC-style closure commission (or any closure commission)
- No Solvency Authority
- No breaching or overriding of collective bargaining agreements
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