Postmaster General Potter Outlines Dire Strait of USPS
The man who wants to end Saturday mail delivery is pressed for time. The way Postmaster General John E. Potter sees it, he has less than six months to convince Congress and the nation of the urgent need to retool the U.S. Postal Service for the 21st century. By fall, the Postal Service won't have enough money to make payroll, Potter predicts. But big customers, regulators, lawmakers and organized labor still have to be won over. Which might help explain Potter's stark assessment. He wants Congress to roll back a law requiring the Postal Service to prepay retiree health benefits. But he also wants the flexibility to change the business model -- by dropping Saturday deliveries, replacing post offices with outposts in suburban supermarkets and cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs through attrition.
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