Dive Brief:

• Funding would be made available to equip every post office in the United States with security cameras under a House bill introduced last week.
• “USPS should have security cameras monitoring its facilities — both inside and outside — to protect employees, customers and property,” says the bill’s sponsor, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C.  
• Holmes says she introduced the bill after learning a person was robbed at a Washington, D.C., post office that had no cameras. “USPS responded that it was not financially feasible to install and maintain security cameras at every postal facility,” she said. “This bill would … authorize appropriations to carry out the camera program.”

Dive Insight:

A 2006 law called the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act put the agency under a financial constraint that it has yet to recover from, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis. Among other things, the bill required the agency to prefund health insurance costs for its retired employees at an accelerated rate while restricting how it can invest its money to pay for that.  

“No other entity — public or private — has been forced to prefund the cost of retiree benefits under such conditions,” the analysis says.

The act also put constraints on its ability to compete against private companies like UPS, FedEx and Amazon in the increasingly profitable parcel delivery space.  

“USPS has lost money almost every fiscal year since 2007,” says a report released at the end of last year by the Government Accountability Office.

As of last year, the agency’s maintenance and repair backlog is as much as $20 billion, according to a Postal Service inspector general audit. Broken cameras are part of that backlog along with broken badge readers and broken doors, among other security-related findings.  

“Staff described situations where they acknowledged concerns about the working environment,” the report says. “Despite seeing ongoing safety or security issues, [they] did not report them.”

Security at all federal facilities is a problem, according to a report by the inspector general at the General Services Administration, the federal government’s real estate arm. Over a four-year period that ended late last year, more than 11,000 crimes were committed at federal properties managed by GSA, the report found. 

“Significant problems with … closed-circuit camera surveillance and intrusion-detection systems” were contributing factors, the report says. 

Holmes’ security-camera bill has been referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform but action hasn’t been scheduled yet.