How the U.S. Postal Service can really save itself

The July 23 Washington Forum commentary by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui, "How USPS can save itself," raised some important points about the future of the U.S. Postal Service. The agency must make changes to continue to provide a vital service to the American people, but cutting service, particularly Saturday mail delivery, should not be one of them.

For the Postal Service to effectively plan for the future, Congress must lift unnecessary financial burdens, allowing the agency to think long term rather than make shortsighted cuts to stay above water.

The Postal Service has been backed into a corner by a multibillion-dollar overpayment into the Civil Service Retirement Fund and a congressional mandate that it prefund its retiree health benefits on an accelerated schedule. Since 1971, the Postal Service has made as much as $75 billion in overpayments into its federal retirement fund. If that money were returned to the Postal Service, it could be used to meet the requirement to prefund retiree health benefits. This unnecessary requirement, which forces the agency to pay a 75-year liability in a 10-year time frame, has turned Postal Service profits into losses in two of the past three years.

Fredric V. Rolando, Washington

The writer is president of the AFL-CIO's National Association of Letter Carriers.