Trump Moves to Gut the Post Office Some may be inclined to think that Donald Trump’s executive orderThur sday night establishing a task force to recommend reforms for the U.S. Postal Service reflects another salvo in the president’s war against Amazon. Trump’s attack on Amazon, a clear bypr oduct of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, included the suggestion that the online retailer was “ripping off the post office” by securing a special deal for the USPS to ship packages the last mile. By reviewing the finances of the post office, Trump’s task force could demand increases to that shipping contract, possibly costing Amazon billions of dollars. Whether Amazon actually is getting a special deal on shipping is open to intense debate. The company also happens to enjoy a discount on stamps, which
they then mark up to their own marketplace sellers, a pure arbitrage deal to earn profits from a publicly issued product. But these issues have almost nothing to do with the Trump executive order. The Amazon spat is a cover for the formal unveiling of a long-wished rightwing project to destroy the post office and have private industry take over its infrastructure, which taxpayers funded long ago. All the executive order really does is create a report; it would take a willing Congress to deliver the final hammer blow. But that report, with a government imprimatur, will become part of that right-wing wish list, living on for decades in think tanks and private shipping company boardrooms as a fervent dream. And sometimes dreams become reality.
Let’s look at the executive order, which is a bit deceptive in its intentions. The policy section manages to mention that the Postal Service routinely earns the highest public approval rating of any agency in the federal government. But then it layers on the bad news: the decline in first-class mail volume—$65 billion in losses since 2009, an “unsustainable fiscal path.” Amazingly, the policy section alludes to the inability of the USPS to fund retiree health and pension benefit obligations, without stating that it has the impossibly high statutory burden of pre-funding those obligations 75 years out, effectively having to pay today for future workers who have not yet been born. No public agency or private company has any
similar burden. It was placed on the Postal Service in the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act to deliberately cripple the agency at the behest of UPS and FedEx, its two major competitors on package delivery. There should be no confusion: Without this completely anomalous pre-funding mandate, the USPS would be a moneymaking operation, regardless of the rise of email. But while alluding to “inflexible costs,” the executive order says that the USPS “must be restructured to prevent a taxpayer-funded bailout.” Yet, a true restructuring would require only one line of legislative text: “The 75-year pre-funding mandate is hereby repealed.” The fake crisis would be over. But that’s not what Donald Trump’s minders want….Read More
Drugmaker Group Sets Lobbying Record The drug industry set several quarterly records for lobbying spending in the first three months of 2018 as it faced pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration and lawmakers on drug pricing, generic medicines and trade. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $9.96 million on federal lobbying, according to disclosures filed Friday with the government. The trade group increased its spending by nearly $2 million from the same period in 2017, when it also set a quarterly record. Bayer Corp., AbbVie Inc., Sanofi US, Novo Nordisk A/S and Celgene Corp all reached new highs in their spending as well. Spending on lobbying was reported twice a year until 2008. PhRMA lobbied against legislation to stop drugmakers from denying generic-drug companies the ability to study their products to bring low-cost competition to market. At one
point, the measure was close to being included in budget legislation passed by Congress in February. PhRMA won that battle but ended up taking a rare loss that will cost the industry billions. Looking for ways to raise funds for the budget measure, lawmakers changed a formula under Medicare’s prescription drug benefit that would require drugmakers to offer larger discounts to patients with high medical bills. Trump has repeatedly vowed to bring down soaring drug prices -- he said companies were “getting away with murder” -and has asked his administration to find ways to do it. A group of administration officials is working on a plan expected to be unveiled later this month, and lawmakers have also introduced bills to squeeze the industry. Trade Issues Secretary of Health and
Human Services Alex Azar, a former Eli Lilly & Co. executive, told reporters in March that the administration was considering regulatory actions and plans to seek input from companies, consumers and others. PhRMA also lobbied on intellectual property and trade as Trump renegotiates the North American Free Trade Agreement and other accords and threatens tariffs on imported Chinese products. On several issues, the group disclosed that it had lobbied the White House directly. Separately, several companies also reported their expenditures. Bayer spent $3.45 million, AbbVie $2.89 million, Sanofi $2.03 million, Celgene $1.22 million and Novo Nordisk $1.46 million. In addition to the records, Pfizer Inc. spent $4.65 million, up from $3.79 a year earlier. Merck & Co. spent $3.31
million, nearly double its spending in the first quarter of 2017. Eli Lilly & Co. spent $1.34 million, down from $1.39 million a year earlier. Abbott Laboratories spent $790,000 in the first quarter, the same as it had in the same period in 2017. Insurers’ Goals Insurers also stepped up their lobbying efforts. A trade group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, spent $2.28 million in the first quarter, up from $1.65 million a year earlier, according to the filings. Insurers were pushing hard for a legislative package to stabilize the Obamacare insurance market. They wanted Congress to offer states money to help pay for those with the most expensive care and finance subsidies Trump cut off in October that help insurers offset low-income consumers’ out-of-pocket costs. It became clear in March the package was unlikely to pass.
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