http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/07/8191425-twisted-government-accounting-behind-postal-service-woes wrote:
There's a long and a short story to the tragic tale of Postal Service financial trouble. I'll start with the short one. Right now, the Postal Service is being forced to pre-pay health benefits for the next 75 years during a 10-year stretch. In the past four years, those prepayments have totaled $21 billion. The agency's deficit during that time is about $20 billion. Remove these crazy pre-payments — a requirement that no other government agency endures and no private industry would even consider — and the Postal Service would be in the black.
Granted, that's an msnbc story and is probably over-hyped at least a little bit. So I went digging into the actual Act that was enacted to see how over-hyped the story was. Relevant section is Section 8909a. found on page 55 of 67.
In short, it appears that it is true there is a a provision in place that does require payment from the USPS to a Treasury-controlled account, and it doesn't seem to me that it defines what "payments" are permitted via use of the capital in that fund. That seems pretty obnoxious to me, ontop of being entirely unnecessary. If you're going to cut-off an agency from funding, then do it all the way.