A provision added to a House spending bill could force USPS to not only cancel plans—already suspended temporarily—to close more facilities to save costs but also could force the postal service to reopen some of those already closed, CBO has said.
Language to require the USPS to reinstate service standards in effect up to 2012 was accepted in the House Appropriations Committee. Relaxing those standards allowed the USPS to close about 150 mail processing facilities, about a third of its inventory, and to save about $1.5 billion a year in operating costs, it said.
“To attempt to comply with the amendment USPS would need to at least partly reverse those changes by adding work hours, reopening facilities that have been closed or sold, and replacing equipment it no longer owns,” the CBO said.
It would cost well over $1 billion in 2016 for USPS to attempt to fully comply with the amendment, the CBO said.
It added: “However, in CBO’s judgment the USPS does not have sufficient resources to do that, and the agency’s past actions demonstrate that it likely would give continued funding of its daily operations a higher priority than attempting to comply with a new Congressional mandate.”
