Sen. Sanders pitches USPS as one-stop shop for mail, printing, banking
Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow and the governance project director at the R Street Institute, said the Postal Service and the postal task force should look at cutting costs rather than expanding into new businesses.
“The Postal Service, by law, is supposed to carry mail and parcels — that’s it,” Kosar said in an interview Friday.
In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which reduces the Postal Service’s ability to venture into non-postal business.
The same law has also required USPS to pre-fund the health care benefits for future postal retirees, a major financial burden for the agency. By the end of fiscal 2017, USPS owed the fund more than $38 billion.
“Sen. Sanders starts with the proposition that if the Postal service is losing more, we need to figure out some way to bring more money to it, rather than to consider that perhaps the demand for its services is simply declining, and that maybe the Postal Service should, therefore, reduce its costs, so that it is in line with current market demands,” Kosar said.
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Kosar said the Postal Service has certainly grown its package business, but it remains to be seen whether that revenue can recoup the losses in first-class mail.
“They’ve come in and they’ve brought in a lot of new dollars, but of course they come with a lot of costs. The Postal Service’s market share in them – the future’s just not certain,” he said.
