“Beyond parody,” says Paige.

Washington, D.C. – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today excoriated the U.S. Post Office’s senior executives for voting themselves bonuses of up to 25 percent of their salaries, despite a projected $2 billion loss this year, and reports of massive waste, fraud, and abuse.

“The postal executives’ decision to reward themselves with extra cash in a year of record-breaking losses sums up what’s wrong with the Post Office management,” CAGW Vice President Leslie Paige.  “It’s really beyond parody.  In private sector business, the shareholders would probably have dismissed the executive who even proposed this idea.  The Post Office’s senior staff are mostly career civil servants, used to endlessly increasing rates, mediocre innovation, poor long-term productivity rates, and a government-protected market share.”

The Postal Service receives huge tax and regulatory exemptions, Treasury-backed financing, and first class mail monopoly rights.

“This move marks a distinctly inauspicious beginning for new Postmaster General John E. Potter and signals he is one of the boys in the bureaucracy when it comes to reforming the Post Office,” Paige added.  “The postal bureaucracy possesses the unfortunate combination of a tin ear for politics and bureaucratic arrogance.  It looks like we can expect less business-style reform, cost-cutting, and streamlining, and more of the ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-ground approach to its self-inflicted problems.  This is not good for the long-term wellbeing of postal rate payers, workers, and the institution itself.” 

The Postal Service’s own Inspector General reports $1.4 billion per annum in waste, fraud, and abuse, and the General Accounting Office has added the Postal Transformation Process of the USPS to its high risk list.   Since 1980, despite falling postal demand, the Postal Service has increased its workforce by 36 percent.  It now employs more than 900,000 people.  In addition, the Postal Office owes the U.S. Treasury $9.3 billion and is expected to reach its debt ceiling in the near future. 

On Capitol Hill, previous legislative reform efforts have been unsatisfactory since they would permit the Postal Service to raise rates even faster, jump into new businesses, and do nothing to improve oversight.  “Is Congress listening?” Paige also said.  “Postal officials have spent the better part of a year crying poor mouth, mewling for rate hikes and threatening to cut Saturday deliveries, but now it isn’t too broke to hand out large bonuses to the same managers who got them into the current mess?  That’s chutzpah.”

“The Post Office is illustrating for the world why ultimately it must be privatized if it is going to survive,” Paige added.  “There is no private business on Earth that would find itself losing money, hugely overstaffed, completely inefficient and say, ‘Hey, let’s raise prices, cut service, and give ourselves a raise!’”

CAGW is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government.