without that, we will continue to muddle our way through the economy. what we do here is we provide predictability. the postal service will be around. it will be around in a different size and form and fashion to some extent than it used to be. some of you heard me, used to be the vice chair of the federal reserve when alan greenspan was chairman. he came before the finance committee on deficit reduction. he talked about health care. reducing costs of health care. we are doomed. everything else is window dressing. i said to him in a question and answer. what is the recommendation on health care? how do we save money here? he said i'm not an expert. he said this is what i do. i find out what works and do more of that. that's what he said. i find out what works and do more of that. you mean find out what doesn't work and do less of that?

he said yes, that's right. we have seen this movie a couple of years ago. we saw it with the auto industry. what the auto industry has done is right size the enterprise. they had more employees and plants. with the market share that they held. they went from 1970 market share to 2009 from 85% to 45%. they wreren't making cars that people wanted to buy. that has changed. an industry in this country that a lot of people thought was dying has come back. a lot of people think the post office is a relic for a bygone era. i think it has a lot of relevance. senator collins has alluded to, there are 7 million jobs that are related to the postal industry and need for the industry to be viable and do its

job more and a more cost effective way. just as the auto industry has right sized, that what the postal service needs to do with the legislation. they have more employees than they need. it is down from 800,000 to 550,000. they want to bring it down by another 100,000 over the next couple of years. this legislation will help them. not by laying people off or labor contracts, but incentivizing people to retire. we want to incentivize them. i am a guy to see how you can leverage and get more with less. what we are doing here is making sure that the $7 billion overpayment to the federal employee retirement system can be used in part to help people retire. 80% of the cost of the postal service is people. they have more employees than they need. this will help them get their

head count down to right size the enterprize. it is hard for us to defend. you have a post office in america, whether it is delaware, and they are playing $60,000 for a post master and then you have stamps that are 60 cents. somebody will be in and out of the post office several times a day to provide the mailing needs of that community. people are looking for us to do smart things. more results for less money. the other two points. health care costs are involved here. we allow the postal service to do -- they pay for medicare for employees. they contribute to the health plan. they are paying twice for the health care costs. what we allow them to do is have primary source of health care

coverage for employees who come from medicare. to create the plan which is a medi-gap plan. that is smart. we give them the authority to negotiate with the labor unions to come up with a stand alone and come out of the federal employee health plan deal. they need to be able to have better results for less money. senator collins has pushed curbside delivery. we will not mandate it for every community, but where it does, that might save some money. from six days to five days, we say if we don't of cost savings is needed, that two years from now, they are free to go from six to five. in the meantime, i urge the postal service to continue to negotiate with the labor unions to come up awage/benefit structure for saturday service

to save money in doing that. the last thing i want to say is it is not enough. i like to say facing a budget deficit in the country. it is not enough just to cut or raise taxes or revenues, we have to find ways to grow the economy. the postal service has to find ways to grow their business. they have to be more entrepreneurial. partnering with u.p.s. or fed ex to deliver for them. the mail for the last mile for the packages around the country. it makes money. we allow the postal do what u.p.s. and fed ex does. deliver wine and beer. there are other ideas out there. one is virtual mailboxes. a lot of ideas that the postal service needs to consider. it makes sense. when they do those things, we can't just get in the way. there is an ad campaign with home depot. you can do it. we can help. we have a good idea of what

needs to be done. we need to able to help. the last thing i want to say is this. we have tried, the four of us, working on this with our staffs. all of you have tried to abide by the golden rule. how would we want to be treated if we are the business customers? how do we want to be treated as residential customers? how would we want to be treated if we worked for the postal service? we tried to keep that in mind. i think we have -- can this bill be improved? sure it can. it will be improved in the next couple of hours. everything i do, i know i can do better. that is true for the legislation. as we move this markup and move to the floor, we need to make sure at the end of the day and end of the year, we haven't just kicked the can down the road for the postal service. we have given them the tools to solve a problem and restore the confidence that the american people not just in the postal

service, but our ability to govern. thank you. >> thank you. i thank you, senator brown, for being part of it. >> i'll be brief. there is not much more to say. failure is not an option and what i wanted to do is make sure we can make the post office viable and treat the employees with the respect they deserve and try to come up with opportunities to not only retire and reduce the work force, but continue to be employed. susan mentioned if we do nothing, it will close in a very short period of time. all of the ancillary jobs that go into it, i took into consideration like senator carper and collins and now you. i was impressed by the compromise and the give and take. i know senator carper came in

really hard on one particular issue. wanted to focus on one issue. susan gave a little bit and vice versa. i felt it was appropriate. i am looking forward to the amendments. >> thank you. i would like to offer a substitute for consideration at this time and use it as our base text as we debate the bill today. this is offered on behalf of senator collins, carper, brown and myself. several technical changes. i believe it has been distributed to the members and staff. so, just by way of announcement, the deputy postmaster general is good enough to be here. we asked him to be here specifically so that there may be at some point in the discussion fact questions that come up that he will be able to answer that perhaps even our

extraordinarily smart and hard working staffs might not. as i indicated earlier, we will go side to side beginning on the basis of seniority. you can pick if you have more than one amendment, you can take that up first. we will begin with senator levin. >> the second substitute amendment? >> there you go. every now and then i think you are a rookie. okay. senator brown seconds the substitute. all in favor. just for the sake of being a base. aye. that is adopted. senalevin, you want to begin? >> i'll begin with an amendment.

>> okay. s>> i think it is amendment number three thathas to do with the transparency of contracts between the postal service and people with whom they deal. is that the right number? >> that is correct. >> i'm very much in supportive of the provisions. let me extend my thanks to the four of you, the four horsemen, who brought this to where we are. one of the provisions in the bill has to do with the transparency to make sure that we know what the postal service is doing. i was interested in what their contracts were with the folks that they deliver mail for and that they transport mail for.

that's fed ex and u.p.s. i just thought i would take a look at those contracts and was told that i can't look at the contracts. that only one person in congress under those contracts is allowed to look at the contracts. they are redacted. and it reads that the only person who can get it is the chairman of the house sub committee with oversight responsibility. >> there's a story here. >> i know there is. >> we don't know it, but there is a story here. >> that's what i want to find out. i have never seen a provision like that. it is not just offensive to the senate, but congressional oversight. it is offensive to the taxpayers of the united states. i just want to see what the deal is. i think senator colburn

mentioned we should deliver the last mile of mail for u.p.s. and fed ex. we do deliver the last mile for them in many places. which is fine. i'm all in favor of that. providing it is a fair deal. we have some oversight responsibility. apparently they transport most of the mail that goes by air now. it is not by our traditional airlines which is what i kind of assumed from boyhood. it is being done by fed ex and u.p.s. that's fine. it is probably a very efficient way to do it. i just want to see the contract. so, what i did with the approval of our chair and our ranking member was notify folks that i would issue a subpoena and we checked with my ranking member on sub committee on investigation senator colburn that we will issue a subpoena to get a hold of the contracts. at that point, i was told, okay,

you can see the contracts. well, what this amendment does is to provide that u.p.s. will not enter into a contract which prohibits congressional oversight. >> second. >> yes. seconded by senator brown. further discussion? senator levin, we all know is a persistent hard working member of the senate. he follows matters down trails which sometimes lead to surprising places. this one did. all right. is there further discussion? really, thank, carl, for pursuing this to come to a totally unacceptable place where we can change with the amendm t amendment. all in favor say aye. the amendment is adopted. senator colburn. >> thank you, mr. chairman.

i would just like to make a couple of comments. then i would like to defer my first amendment and allow senator cain to take the position. you all worked very hard on this. there are some good things. >> tom, is your microphone on? >> it's on. i'm not close enough. i remember what we said five years ago. this fixes it. that's what we said. the chairman said it. the ranking members said it. you were chairman then. we were going to fix it. the one thing we didn't do in that bill was give the post office the flexibility to run as a business. and we're making the same mistake again. we are telling them what they can and can't do. there is a lot of positives in this bill, hopefully it will get better as we move through the amendment process. i will predict to you the bill as written now will not fix the

post office. we will be back again. we don't have the luxury of not fixing it this time. i co-sponsored senator mccain's bill not because it is the best solution, but i think it is a better one than what has been negotiated. i wanted to say i don't like an appreciation for what you have come up with for a compromise. i think there is a lot of great stuff in it. if you want to get the post office out of business, you need to let them know what to do. you have to get them to five-day delivery quickly. it is $3.1 billion a year. you want to get them out of trouble, that is what you have to do. the other thing is people will adjust to five-day delivery. there will not be medicines that miss that come on saturday. they will come in on friday. all of that will adjust. the question is do we want to wait five years and allow them to continue to lose money, maybe

less, until we finally get to the point where we say you can run this as a business with the products you have and do it in an efficient and effective way to create viability and compensate those that serve in the post office? and compensate the commitments they had to all of the people? this is a slow death. we have an opportunity to really fix things and give them the power to do what they need to do. i just think we are not going far enough and that's my worry. i know my view as a minority, i understand that. i will predict to you -- i probably won't be here when we are doing this again, but you will be doing this again if this bill becomes law. the real thing is we ought to fix it. that means there is a lot of unpleasantness for us to not allow the post office to close the facilities that they and the management think they need to close. no matter where they are and how

much heat we as politicians take over that, is saying we don't want you to succeed. you are not capable of making the decisions on volume. we would rather fail than take the heat. you have to go to five-day delivery and do it quickly. then you need to give them the ability to control their costs. if you do that and you give them what tom has offered with other ways to increase the revenue, they will solve the problem. we won't micro manage it. with that, i defer to senator mccain. >> do you want to respond? >> i just want to very quickly respond to one point that my friend and colleague made since he was critical of the 2006 act, which senator carper and i were the lead sponsors of.

in 2005, the gao put the postal service on its high-risk list. as a result of the bill that became law that we authored in 2006, the gao took the postal service off its high-risk list. and indeed, if you look at the revenue figures in the years following, the postal service did do better as a result of the reforms. for the first time, we started tackling the huge unfunded liabilities of the postal service, which had never been tackled before. are we back in a worse situation now? absolutely. there is a lot of reasons for that. but the fact is the gao thought that our law was sufficient to remove the postal service from

the high-risk list. now put it back on in a few years. >> my point was was not to be critical. lots of positive things came out of it, but it did not fix the problems because we did not go far enough and you are doing the same thing again. if you want the postal service to survive, give them the ability to make the decisions they need to survive. one of those, both from the postmaster general and president is let them go to five-day delivery and let them have the flexibility to open and close the facilities that they know need to be opened or closed. anything short of that doesn't mean it won't help, it will help. we will be right back here again. if we want them to be a business and compete in the market, give them the tools to do that and the management authority to make the changes they need to do. that doesn't mean they don't have to have great relationships with their labor contracts.

it doesn't mean they can skimp on the things. what we are ability to make the critical decisions for them to survive. >> thanks, senator coburn. i can't resist saying two things briefly. one is that i think the postal reform of 2006 was actually a substantial accomplishment, but something else happened which is that e-mail took off and the postal service has seen the volume of mail drop 22% in the last three years. most of that is the movement of all sorts of activity to e-mail. some of it is the result of the bad economy. so i think that postal reform would achieve more if it wasn't for the change in the environment and also i think that we're giving the postmaster a lot more authority in this building than the earlier reform

act. and i think he'll use it. maybe should go -- yeah. senator mccain, you've got -- >> i just got to say to senator lieberman, there was a lot of us in 2006 that predicted that e-mail and other means of communication were -- would be dramatically on the rise. didn't surprise some of us. and that really brings up the whole problem here. the problem is that we are seeing an industry that was incredibly important for americans to be able to communicate with one another, for a couple of centuries, that now is being overtaken by technology. the same way the horse and buggy business was taken over by the automobile. the same way the bridle business went out of business, because we are seeing technology and means of communications that now no longer require us to use the postal service. and the only way that the postal

service is gonna survive is to adjust to the times and be able to make the decisions that every other industry in america had to make, as we go to this new technology and for information technology that has changed america. it has given rise to dramatically new industries, such as google and facebook and all of the other things. in fact, it's what -- major factors in the arab spring. so to somehow place into law prohibitions for this industry to make the necessary moves in order to survive and even thrive because there's certainly a role for the postal service in the 21st century, but it's not the old role. so when you say they can't go to five days a week, when you say they can't close facilities that

absolutely need closing, what you're doing is preventing from them to keep up with the 21st century. i appreciate the 2,206 reforms that were made and the predictions at the time and i'll be glad to give you the congressional record were we'd never have to address this issue again. well, here we are. so i'm trying to help the postal service. i'm trying to help -- just as -- make them make the decisions that every major industry in america is making today to adjust to the new information age. and when you put into law that they can't make those decisions, is there anybody that believes that they wouldn't save money by going to a five-day workweek? can't they decide whether they think that's best for the future of the postal service or do we in our wisdom dictate to them, well, no, you have to keep delivering mail on saturday? well, it's $3 billion.

what's $3 billion? probably not much in the way we do business around here today, but to most americans it's a fairly sizable sum. they believe that savings of $3 billion would be important in getting the postal service back on its feet. so the only thing by the way that the congressional mandate in 1984 is the only thing that's prevented the postal service from moving to five-day mail delivery and still be able to provide universal service. the postal service has to as i say adopt to changing times. again, to make my point, the average household ten years ago received five pieces of mail a day. it now gets four pieces of mail a day. and by 2020 they will get three pieces of mail a day. so in total mail volume is down

from 46 billion pieces since its peak in 2006. first class mail volume will be 50% off its peak by the year 2020. mail volume is declining because of the permanent shift to e commerce. let the postal service recognize that and make the necessary adjustments. that's what they want to do. that's what the president of the united states wants to do as usual i'm on the side of the president of the united states. half the postal work service is involved in delivery in 80% of postal services costs are for pay and for benefit. again, usbs estimates it will save $3 billion every year. ten-year period, $30 billion. so the gao an organization that we use with incredible regularity and frequency and has

more frankly credibility than any other organization in washington today says on a march 2011 report moving to five-day mail delivery, quote, would improve the financial condition by increasing efficiency and better aligning its delivery operations with reduced mail volumes. so i would point out that the postal service's plan has a number of steps designed to preserve service to the extent possible. keep post offices open on saturday, delivery mail to p.o. boxes on saturday and delivery express mail seven days a week. so, you know, i go to town hall meetings as we all do all the time and, you know, not one at town hall meeting have i have been where the top priority has been to keep saturday mail delivery. it's been about the fact that we

continue to tax and spend and borrow and we're on the hook, the taxpayers of america are on the hook for the postal service as we all know in a variety of ways. so i hope that my colleagues would vote to at least give the postal service the flexibility to do what's necessary to get back on the path to fiscal stability in very difficult circumstances in light of the changing in a rapidly changing technology. by the way, i just got one of the new phones. call cindy. that's all you have to do anymore. even i can figure that out. >> but i know cindy and i think she'd like the get a note from you. a handwritten note. >> touche. so i ask -- so i ask -- thank you. so could i ask for consideration

of amendment number five which is five-day mail delivery. >> yes, indeed. let me respond briefly and then just to clarify, senator mccain, this would authorize the -- the five-day -- >> mr. chairman? could i interrupt? is it possible for me to speak out of order? we're about to go to a vote. so if i could -- >> go right away. >> i want to go back to what my friends, senator mccain and senator coburn said earlier. like the auto industry, too many employees, the postal service very similar situation. they need to right size the enterprise. senator issa whose legislation you introduced as a option here, while we share their goals we get theirs different. i understand from the issa

legislation it would allow for the abrogation of the labor contracts. it sets up a process for a closing post offices. we have been -- thank you. i have been -- we have been strong supporters of brack over the years and here in the house and in the senate. but we don't need a brack-like structure to figure out how to close post offices, how to colocate in grocery stores and, you know, and pharmacies and places like that. we don't need a brack-like process to just allow the postal service to decide, well, they don't need to pay 50 or $60,000 for a postmaster who sells stamps. they can put somebody in on a path-time basis. we don't need a brack-like process. we need to come up with savings,