Allowing United States Postal Service To Accept Donations For Plaques

Floor Speech

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Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I thank the chairman for bringing this bill to the floor today. The genesis of this bill was in fact a recognition that the Postal Service funds all of its operations out of its own revenue. In no other area would the Federal Government essentially mandate a burden on a government agency over which it provides no funding, and yet here we do.

More importantly, most post offices are either named after fallen heroes in our own district, former Members of the House or Senate, or, in some cases, other notable people, and even, once in a while, a postmaster.

The fact is we make those decisions. We name those post offices. Those plaques cost money to procure and to maintain, and a recognition that in fact communities' involvement should be there, there should be a real upswelling of support.

Myself, I named a post office after the first Indo American Member of Congress, Dalip Singh Saund. I was proud to do it. And on the day that we put the plaque up, I had Members from all over California, and actually a few outside of the Indo American community, proud that the first Indo American--and the only one, except for Bobby Jindal--was being honored at a post office.

The fact is, that community would have been more than happy to not only pay for the plaque, but to help design it and to be more involved in it. That kind of support is something that we're missing because we didn't take this opportunity.

The legislation is relatively small. It perhaps would only save a few hundred thousand dollars a year to the post office, but I think it makes the kind of statement that the post offices and the names on them are important community activities and that in the future the procurement and perhaps the ongoing support will come from the community, with the enabling language here.

It also is a small but meaningful step toward the kind of reform of the post office that they want to do and that we want to help them do, and, that is, if they're going to have to live on their own revenue, Congress should not be adding to their cost of doing business.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

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