(Washington, D.C.) – The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) today released the following letter by CCAGW President Tom Schatz to members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee relating to scheduled hearings on reforming the United States Postal Service:

On behalf of its more than one million members and supporters across the nation, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) is encouraged by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee’s scheduled hearings on issues related to long-overdue reform of the United States Postal Service (USPS).  Fortified with the recommendations from the President’s Commission on the United States Postal Service, you now have a blueprint for change.

Most importantly, the commission recommended that the USPS should be more transparent and accountable.  The current regulatory regime fails to provide a complete picture of the agency’s real revenues and expenditures.

The commission also noted that the USPS’s structural inefficiencies and excessive costs appear throughout the agency, and asked this question:  “If the Postal Service can deliver ‘affordable rates’ without rooting out what many believe to be billions of dollars in inefficiencies and unnecessary costs, is the Postal Service providing the best service it can to the nation?  Clearly, the answer is ‘no’.”  CCAGW is concerned that the USPS has leveraged its monopoly mail revenues to cross-subsidize many of its money-losing ventures.  That is why a complete, independent operational audit is necessary.

Even as the USPS fails to root out billions in waste, officials continue to lobby Congress for the authority to expand into new lines of business and services in order to rationalize its sprawling infrastructure and bloated workforce.  CCAGW urges Congress to resist any reforms that would grant this bloated, wasteful agency increased authority to enter new commercial services.

Instead, CCAGW believes that, as Congress moves forward to reform the USPS, it should act upon another key USPS commission finding:  that the USPS is burdened with excess capacity, both in personnel and bricks and mortar infrastructure, and the first step in any postal reform effort must be “right-sizing” the USPS.  The USPS must be required to eliminate any non-postal services it currently offers and put a moratorium on the development of any new, non-postal commercial ventures.  In so doing, Congress would get postal reform off on the right footing.

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