CAGW Names Rep. Marcy Kaptur July 2019 Porker of the Month | Citizens Against Government Waste

CAGW Names Rep. Marcy Kaptur July 2019 Porker of the Month

Porker of the Month

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) named Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) July 2019 Porker of the Month for trying to expand the financially challenged United States Postal Service (USPS) into banking.

A lot has changed in the past 11 years, but one constant has been the USPS’s annual losses, totaling $69 billion.  That does not even include its $143 billion in unfunded liabilities.  The USPS’s poor financial situation has persisted even as it maintains monopolistic advantages over its competitors worth $8 billion every year.  Postmaster General Megan Brennan even admitted in 2018 that, “our business model is broken.”

While most taxpayers would look at this sorry record and conclude that such an enterprise should regroup, right-size its operations, and cut expenses to balance its books, Rep. Kaptur sees an opportunity for expansion.  She told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer on May 28, 2019 that the American people “trust” the Postal Service and expanding it could, “help fill real financial voids” in the financial industry and provide banking services to the 6.5 percent of Americans who may be “unbanked.”  Among the many problems with her proposal is the fact that there are already more than 88,000 retail bank branches and 475,000 ATMs nationally, online banking services and apps on mobile devices.  Rep. Kaptur thinks that the addition of just 31,000 USPS branches will move the needle in the financial services industry and magically fix the USPS’s manifest mismanagement.

CAGW President Tom Schatz said, “Rep. Kaptur might think that the American people trust the USPS, but there is nothing trustworthy or reliable about its fiscal situation.  Current financial institutions are well-equipped to provide a variety of services and more able to adapt to changing market trends and technological advances in ways that the USPS has proven it cannot.  Allowing the USPS to expand into financial services is the height of wastefulness.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.  For more than two decades, Porker of the Month is a dubious honor given to lawmakers and government officials who have shown a blatant disregard for the interests of taxpayers.