House Panel OKs Door Delivery Savings Bill

NAPS Leg/Reg Update – May 21, 2014

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today approved cost-savings legislation that would require the Postal Service to convert door delivery at 15 million homes and businesses to lesser expensive delivery options over the next ten years. The approval of the “Secure Delivery for America Act” (HR 4670) came on an 18-13 vote, split along party lines.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House committee and sponsor of the bill, said the measure was a “targeted, flexible and data-driven way to save the fiscally-troubled Postal Service several billion dollars a year.” He said the bill also provided mail security to USPS customers.

Committee Democrats countered that the measure would be impossible to implement in urban areas, where adequate space for mail receptacles is hard to find and would install pricing for services that Americans were accustomed to receiving without charge. (The Issa measure would allow postal customers to retain door delivery for an unspecified fee.) Panel Democrats also criticized Issa for not including the proposal within a larger postal legislative package that addressed more pressing postal issues, including adjusting the Postal Service’s retiree health prefunding payments, returning the FERS retirement surplus to the Postal Serivce, and permanently mandating six-day mail delivery. Their efforts today to add these provisions to the bill were ruled out of order and non-germane by Issa on parliamentary grounds.

Issa acknowledged the need for a comprehensive bill, but noted that his draft proposal several weeks ago, which matched the Obama White House’s postal reform proposals, could not attract support from other House GOP members. Issa said he was likely, instead, to craft a new postal reform bill based on measures that have won support in his committee, like today’s measure (HR 4670) and Alaska bypass mail (HR 4174). Given the difficulties of postal politics in an election year, the success of that strategy remains uncertain. In the Senate, the committee-approved postal reform bill (S. 1486) continues to languish, poisoned by a firearms provision that has discouraged Majority Leader Reid from bringing the measure to the floor.

Overall, the outlook for action on postal reform in the 113th Congress remains cloudy. Observers in Washington point to a potential lame-duck session, following the November elections, as a possible time for action; they note that the timing of passage of the 2006 postal law also occurred during the lame duck session following that year’s mid-term elections.

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Bruce Moyer
NAPS Counsel
[email protected]