The United States Postal Service will have a $200 million surplus, not a $200 million deficit, the Post Office asserted yesterday. The statement made in an address before the Parcel Shippers Association (PSA) refuted some of the April 20 statements made by Postal Rate Commission chairman Ed Gleiman.
At the same time the Postal Service issued a press release stressing positive comments about the USPS Executive Vice President and CEO Clarence E. Lewis Jr. made at a mail industry conference in Atlantic City on April 14. Apparently the attempt is to counter statements the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers attributed to him in its weekly newsletter.
The April 23 issue of the newsletter quoted Lewis as accusing USPS competitors of being behind postal reform legislation pending in Congress. If the bill passed in its original form, it “would have virtually put us out of business or limited us to just the delivery of certain first class letters and third class mail.”
Gleiman, according to USPS spokesman “was basing his comments on incorrect reports that the USPS was facing a $200 million deficit for this fiscal year,” according to an USPS spokesman. “With revenues of $60 billion, the postal service actually anticipates ending the fiscal year with a $200 million surplus.”
Gleiman stands by his original statements. “All I know is what I read in the newspapers,” he said, citing articles discussing the USPS’s financial problems in The Washington Post and The Federal Times. Gleiman added, “If the Post Office wants to refute statements made by its own Postmaster General.”
In addressing the PSA’s general meeting he said recent published reports about postal finances were “troubling in that much of the blame for the revenue shortfall relative to its budget is being explained in terms of mailers moving their mail to discount categories that produce less revenue per piece.”
One of those reports, appearing in the Washington Post on April 12 said that “despite a record volume of mail, postal revenue has fallen well below projections at the same time that costs are soaring. Some officials say that part of the projected $281 shortfall in fiscal 1999 is the agency’s own fault: more big mailers are taking advantage of discounted postage, forcing the agency to carry more letters at cheaper prices.”
It went on to say that with the USPS facing the possibility failing “to make the relatively modest $200 million profit that it had initially budgeted for this year,” Postmaster General William J. Henderson ordered “spending cuts totaling more than $800 million” that would eliminate 500 jobs at USPS headquarters, slash consulting and advertising contracts, and delay long planned spending programs.
