(Washington, D.C.) - Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) Vice President Leslie K. Paige today hosted a press conference to address the precarious financial condition of the U.S. Postal Service.  The event was timed to coincide with the USPS’s release of its long-awaited transformation plan.  CAGW, along with representatives of eight other taxpayer watchdog and consumer groups, convened to draw attention to the weaknesses in the plan and demand serious cost-cutting and greater oversight of the money-losing agency. 

"The postal service’s accounting practices are in such shambles that it's anyone's guess what the bottom line is.  Before any transformation plan is implemented, CAGW recommends that a Grace Commission-style audit be performed, publicly-disclosed, full-scale, on-site by an outside, independent entity in order to get a true picture of its financial situation," Paige said.  “The USPS must winnow down and reconfigure its 900,000 person labor force, and determine which postal facilities are non-performing in order to close them.  Today, officials should pull the plug on all USPS non-core businesses, eliminate all non-essential activities like advertising and retail, and root out wasteful practices.  Those near-term actions alone would yield hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.  In the final phase of a true transformation plan, the postal service must be spun off as a fully private entity."

"Today, the USPS has offered up its version of a transformation plan and it falls rather flat," Paige also said.  "Postal officials seem unable to envision anything innovative.  They are wedded to the ‘government-sponsored corporation’ option, which is exactly where we are now and which represents the worst of both worlds.  It leaves the postal monopoly intact, preserves all the postal service’s special benefits, brings no market forces to bear on the agency, imposes no tougher oversight measures, and unleashes the postal service to squeeze even more money from first-class mailers.  Yet, the plan is virtually silent on the cost-cutting side of the equation, which is where most of the postal service’s truly intractable problems lay." 

"Postal management clings to the misguided notion that its financial woes can be addressed if it could simply bring in more revenue.  They are seeking freedom to raise rates and negotiate deals with big mailers  Instead of masquerading as a business, postal officials should go one step further and become a fully private business.  In the near term, postal officials should be making cost-cutting their priority.  In the long term, the aim should be to lift the monopoly, ushering in competitive forces.  It's the only way to stimulate real ingenuity, achieve robust productivity and efficiency, and offer state-of-the-art customer service," Paige concluded. 

The unveiling of the Transformation Plan comes just a week after the Postal Rate Commission approved an above-inflation rate hike, boosting the cost of a first class stamp to thirty-seven cents.  “Raising rates faster will do nothing to stem the flow of red ink.  Every new dollar the postal service takes in now, whether it comes from ratepayers or congressional appropriations, will disappear into that chronically mismanaged bureaucracy.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is the nation's largest nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.