“The Postal Service is on the brink of default,” Mr. Donahoe testified. “The Postal Service requires radical change to its business model if is to remain viable in the future.” 
 
 Mr. Berry said the Obama administration would push for legislation to allow a three-month delay in the $5.5 billion payment. But he stopped short of endorsing a far-reaching proposal, backed by the postal service, to allow the agency to claw back more than $50 billion that two independent actuaries have said the post office has overpaid into a major federal pension plan. Postal Service officials say such a move would go far to alleviate the agency’s financial problems. 
 
 Mr. Berry said the administration was studying the proposal, but not endorsing or opposing it at this point. 
 
 He said the administration would release a more comprehensive proposal in coming weeks “to ensure a sustainable future for the postal service,” one that would be part of the broader $1.5 trillion deficit reduction package that the President Obama has promised to send to Congress. 
 
 The post office’s financial problems are complex. Mail volume has been steadily declining, and the agency has been unable to cut its labor costs or reduce services quickly enough to match the fall in revenue. At the same time, the post office faces legal constraints that prevent it from diversifying into new lines of business, and it is also barred from raising postage prices faster than the rate of inflation. 
 
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 Mr. Berry noted that the Obama administration did support the postal service’s push to recover $7 billion that officials agree was overpaid into yet another pension fund. But he expressed serious reservations about the postal service’s plan to cut costs by moving postal workers into a new, supposedly cheaper health insurance plan. 
 
 The two senators most active on postal issues — Thomas Carper , a Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the subcommittee overseeing the post office, and Susan Collins of Maine , who is the ranking Republican on the governmental affairs committee — criticized the Obama administration for not acting more quickly and decisively to address the post office’s problems. 
 
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 “The proposals put forward by the administration to date have been insufficient,” Mr. Carper said. 
 
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 Ms. Collins added, “I just don’t understand why the administration doesn’t have a plan to put before us today, given the dire straits that we’re in.” 
 
 Several senators from rural states attacked the postal service’s proposals to close many post offices and to end Saturday delivery, saying it would hurt rural Americans disproportionately and would hurt those who rely on mail delivery of prescriptions and newspapers. 
 
 Postal officials say a major reason for the postal service’s financial crisis — it has lost $20 billion over the last four years — is a 2006 law requiring the post office to pay an average of $5.5 billion a year for 10 years to underwrite 75 years of health coverage for future retirees. The post office hopes to use much of $50 billion in claimed pension overpayments to cover those annual health care payments. 
 
 Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, one of the four postal unions, denounced the post office’s proposal to lay off 120,000 workers. The agency has asked Congress to pass a special law overturning no-layoff provisions in its union contracts. Some of those contracts bar the layoff of any workers with more than six years on the job. 
 
 “These proposals are outrageous, illegal and despicable,” Mr. Guffey said. 
 
 He said his union had agreed to $3.7 billion in savings in a contract signed in May to help the postal service cut costs. In return, the union preserved its longstanding job-protection provisions. “To unilaterally abrogate what we gained is totally contrary to the duty to bargain collectively,” he said. 
 
 An overarching trend that has fueled the Postal Service’s crisis — and reduced annual mail volume by 22 percent since 2006 — is that Americans are e-mailing, paying bills electronically and reading shopping catalogs and news online. 
 
 Noting that some great books have been written based on letters sent by the Founding Fathers and by soldiers, Senator Claire McCaskill , Democrat of Missouri , urged the postmaster general to run an advertising campaign urging Americans to send more letters to each other. 
 
 “There is something special about receiving a piece of first-class mail, knowing that it comes from someone you care about,” she said. “I really believe that if someone would begin to market the value of sending a written letter to someone you love, you might be surprised what it will do for your Christmas season.” ||||| The Obama administration will include a financial blueprint for the nearly bankrupt U.S. Postal Service (USPS) in a deficit-reduction package that will be submitted to Congress, an administration official told lawmakers Tuesday. 
 
 With the Postal Service speeding toward default, John Berry, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, also said the administration would like to delay the deadline USPS faces for a massive benefits payment by 90 days. 
 
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 Berry said the extra time would allow the White House, Congress and Postal Service to find a path forward for the agency. 
 
 “Both the president and I know of the critical importance to our nation’s economy that the Postal Service provides,” Berry said at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. 
 
 Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said at the same hearing that pushing the $5.5 billion payment for future retiree healthcare costs back to the end of the year would give USPS some financial breathing room. 
 
 But he also reiterated that the service would default on the payment regardless of the deadline — and that, with technological advancements continuing to eat into its bottom line, USPS needed to radically restructure its business model, with some help from Congress. 
 
 If changes are not made, Donahoe told reporters, “we think that around the August, September time frame next year we would be out of cash.” 
 
 The Postal Service is fast approaching its borrowing limit of $15 billion, leaving officials concerned about a first-ever USPS default. Donahoe told the Senate panel that the Postal Service’s net loss for this fiscal year could run as high as $10 billion, and projects to around $9 billion for next year. 
 
 USPS, which does not use taxpayer revenue for operations, also expects to handle 167 billion pieces of mail this year, 22 percent less than it did in 2006. Officials say the economic struggles of the last five years are at least partly to blame for that decline, but admit that the increasing ability to communicate and pay bills online is a major factor as well. 
 
 Lawmakers at Tuesday’s hearing appeared to see a USPS overhaul as a potential area for bipartisanship in the aftermath of the polarizing debt-ceiling debate. 
 
 “Are we going to fight about the Post Office, too?” Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) asked. 
 
 Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the chairman of the Homeland Security panel, said during the hearing that lawmakers would not be able to act as quickly as Donahoe had wanted. The postmaster general had asked for congressional action by the end of September. 
 
 But Lieberman added that he wanted the panel to move quickly to meld separate pieces of USPS legislation from Sen. Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsSenate Dems to force vote on net neutrality After a respite, Cruz again questioning McConnell’s strategies How long must women wait? MORE (R-Maine), the committee’s ranking member, and Sen. Tom Carper Thomas (Tom) Richard CarperOvernight Energy: Two top Pruitt aides resign at EPA | 17 states sue EPA over car emissions rules | Volkswagen to pay West Virginia .5M over emissions cheating Dem senator urges reconsideration of Trump vehicle emissions plan Federal officials lose track of nearly 1,500 migrant children in US MORE (D-Del.), chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service. 
 
 Donahoe told reporters that, at a bare minimum, he would like for Congress to give USPS the authority to scrap Saturday delivery and give the service access to what it says is a nearly $7 billion overpayment into a federal retirement program. 
 
 The postmaster general also wants lawmakers to allow the service to either look into overseeing its own healthcare benefits or give it access to what USPS says is an even larger overpayment. 
 
 USPS has indicated that it wants the authority to lay off tens of thousands of workers over the next three years, despite labor contracts that contain no layoff provisions, and announced that it is looking into closing thousands of local branches. 
 
 Unions and Democratic lawmakers like Reps. Elijah Cummings (Md.) and Stephen Lynch (Mass.) are pushing back against the labor proposal, with contracts covering roughly 45 percent of the service’s 560,000 career employees expiring in November. 
 
 Rural-state lawmakers have expressed concern about allowing USPS to move to five-day delivery and to shutter offices. 
 
 Still, senators at Tuesday’s hearing at least appeared open to giving USPS a broad makeover. Sen. Tom Coburn Thomas (Tom) Allen CoburnPension insolvency crisis only grows as Congress sits on its hands Paul Ryan should realize that federal earmarks are the currency of cronyism Republicans in Congress shouldn't try to bring back earmarks MORE (R-Okla.) urged his colleagues to ignore what he called rosy projections about how much mail the service will deliver in the coming years. 
 
 Collins also prodded Berry for answers about why the administration is waiting to offer its USPS plan, given the service’s financial straits. The White House is expected to deliver its deficit-reduction plan, which could exceed the $1.5 trillion mandate given to the new congressional supercommittee, in the coming weeks. 
 
 On Tuesday, Berry said the administration agreed that USPS deserved access to the $6.9 billion surplus it paid into the Federal Employees Retirement System. But he also drew Collins’s ire after noting that the White House did not have a formal opinion on other potential fixes. 
 
 “I just don’t understand why the administration doesn’t have a concrete plan to put before us today, given the dire straits that we’re in,” the Maine Republican said. 
 
 Donahoe, meanwhile, appeared satisfied with the progress Congress was making, even though it seems unlikely lawmakers will work through four separate proposed overhauls of the service by the end of September. 
 
 “We appreciate all the attention, and want to work together with both parties to get this rolling,” he said.
– President Obama intends to swoop to the rescue of the ailing US Postal Service—or at least try, reports the New York Times. The White House yesterday announced that it would push for legislation giving the USPS a three-month reprieve on the $5.5 billion it’s supposed to pay on Sept. 30 for future retiree health benefits, saving it at least temporarily from a humiliating default. Even that won’t save the service for long, however—the postmaster general recently testified that, even with the reprieve, they’d run out of money by next July or August. So Obama will also unveil a longer-term plan to save the post office as part of his deficit reduction plan, the Hill reports. He has not yet, however, supported the service’s call to be refunded $50 billion it says it has overpaid into a federal pension plan. The administration says it’s still reviewing that proposal.