This “reform” does little, though, to actually save taxpayer money. It merely shifts a costly burden from one federal agency to another. Medicare expenditures now total more than $800 billion per year, and the program’s main trust fund is expected to hit insolvency by 2026. Adding postal retirement liabilities onto an already-bloated program seems like an odd way to keep costs under control.
The grand Medicare “fix” receives far more attention than an even more alarming provision of the postal proposal.
Section 103 of the act authorizes the USPS to “establish a program to enter into agreements with an agency of any State government, local government, or tribal government to provide property and services on behalf of such agencies for non-commercial products and services…” The limited-sounding scope of the provision seems to rule out the possibility that the USPS will take up banking (which many agency watchers reasonably feared).