By clicking the button on the right, you can automatically send an email to the three Representatives who authored "What Every Conservative Needs to Know About ‘Postal Reform’ (H.R. 22)" -- Reps. Pence, Hensarling and Flake -- and respectfully request that they retract it and correct the record. Or, if you prefer, you can print the letter and send it by mail (U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC 20515). Feel free to edit the suggested letter.

Dear [ Decision Maker ] ,

I write to express my dismay and concern regarding your communication to other Members of Congress concerning H.R. 22, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2005. I have read "What Every Conservative Needs to Know about 'Postal Reform' (H.R. 22)" and wish to correct a number of misconceptions and errors included in its text:

-- The Postal Service has not suffered from an inability to control costs -- it has slashed postal employment by nearly 100,000 workers over the past five years as mail volume growth has stagnated. The fact that labor costs represent a larger percentage of revenues in the USPS than in private companies like UPS and FedEx does not mean that the USPS is inefficient or that postal employees are overpaid. It just means that the Postal Service's business (mostly letters) is inherently more labor-intensive than that of the private firms (mostly parcels). This fact results from a universal service obligation not shared by UPS and FedEx: The USPS delivers to 143 million addresses each day six days a week while the private companies deliver to between 12-15 million addresses per day five days a week.

-- The 2003 law to reform the Postal Services CSRS pension funding formula was not a "bailout." It simply corrected an error that required postage rate-payers to over-fund the Postal Service's pension liabilities. Your paper states that the law "cost" taxpayers $7.1 billion -- suggesting that the Treasury transferred $7.1 billion to the USPS. That did not happen. The Postal Service and its largely business customers were simply spared the unfair burden of over-funding their CSRS pension liabilities. This helped keep postage rates stable and business costs low.

-- The Postal Service is a self-supporting government agency that receives no direct taxpayer subsidy and therefore returning the responsibility for military pension costs to all American taxpayers -- who all benefit from the national defense -- instead of heaping them on the relatively narrow class of American businesses that generate most of the nation's mail volume cannot be fairly called a "bailout." These costs were traditionally paid for by the U.S. Treasury and were mistakenly transferred to the USPS by the 2003 CSRS reform law.

There is nothing "conservative" about helping to shrink the middle class and leaving millions of rural state residents without adequate postal services by shuttering postal facilities and cutting postal pay and benefits. H.R. 22 is a balanced piece of legislation developed over many years in a bipartisan manner -- it was reported out of the House Government Reform Committee on a unanimous vote of 39-0. Conservatives can and should support it. Indeed, all 22 Republicans on the Committee, including all seven RSC members on the Committee, voted for the bill. Of these, 15 have been rated by the American Conservative Union and eight have received a "pro-conservative" rating of 90 percent or more.

I urge you to retract "What Every Conservative Needs to Know about 'Postal Reform' (H.R. 22)" or at least correct its inaccuracies. The members of your Committee and the American people deserve no less.

Sincerely,

Campaign Launched:
June 20, 2005