PMG Endorses Highway Budget Scam

The Postmaster General’s latest act of treachery is so outrageous it’s hard to believe.

Last week, he endorsed a budget scam that would eliminate Saturday mail delivery and hand over the alleged “savings” to the Highway Trust Fund.

The ploy, which was the brainchild of outgoing House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), would eliminate tens of thousands of jobs and reduce service significantly.

The scheme was immediately denounced by Democrats – and many Republicans – as a gimmick that would yield no real savings. That’s because the maneuver is based on a fiction: It assumes there will be “real savings for the Treasury” from a hypothetical future event – a postal bailout.

“Slashing mail delivery service makes no sense in any circumstance, but especially as part of legislation designed to strengthen our nation’s transportation infrastructure,” the four postal union presidents wrote in a June 2 letter to members of Congress. “The USPS is off‐budget and receives no taxpayer support whatsoever. Using the Postal Service as an offset for the Highway Trust Fund is a shell game that relies on illusory savings and accounting gimmicks.”

But that didn’t deter our feckless leader. As the Washington Post reported on June 9, “A plan from House Republicans to buoy the nearly-empty highway trust fund with savings from eliminating Saturday mail delivery has struck many observers as an odd idea – a budget accounting trick that would finance road projects by preventing a future bailout of the U.S. Postal Service.

“But the top postal official says he couldn’t be more pleased.”

Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, issued a scathing response, in a statement posted on the union’s website on June 14:

“Mr. Donahoe’s action may be the most irresponsible thing any Postmaster General has done since the creation of the Postal Service in 1970. If allowed to succeed, this budget gimmick would have set a terrible precedent for the Postal Service. Why raise taxes or reduce spending at taxpayer-funded agencies, when you can pay for pet projects with legislated service cuts at the Postal Service? Need a new aircraft carrier? Slash post office hours. Want a new fleet of planes to fight forest fires? Raise postage rates. The PMG recklessly risked undoing all the hard work we did in the late 1980s to get the Postal Service off-budget, to shield the Postal Service and ratepayers from scheming politicians like Rep. Cantor. The PMG owes every postal employee and every postage rate-payer an apology.”

“We couldn’t agree more,” said APWU President Mark Dimondstein.