124 



Mr. Hardy. Yes, sir, we are cognizant of that and we are trying 

 hard to balance those responsibilities. Some explicit recognition of 

 the whistleblower statute may well be appropriate. That is an issue 

 I hadn't focused on one way or the other. 



What I had focused on, to discuss the personnel issues relative 

 to the TVA example, which you could also easily extrapolate to the 

 postal service, is the ability to downsize. Let's set the whistleblower 

 issue aside for a second. TVA has the ability to offer situation bo- 

 nuses or other financial incentives to pare down the size of its work 

 force on a continuing basis. I do not now nor does any federal agen- 

 cy have that authority. 



We currently have a bill introduced for government-wide early 

 outs, but that will be a one-shot deal. Having that on a continuing 

 basis is enormously helpful in terms of helping restructure your 

 work force in a positive way where people can have voluntary in- 

 ducements to leave and do other things, so you can downsize or, 

 reshape your work force. And I gave you the temporary employee 

 example. Whether it is the classification system, or compensation, 

 or other kinds of things, there are literally hundreds of examples 

 of the kinds of flexibilities that it would give you which do not in- 

 volve really public policy tradeoffs of the whistleblower type. Rath- 

 er, they are just good business practice, and we are trying to focus 

 on those, not neglect our overall policy responsibilities. 



When we earlier described to you the Competitiveness Project as 

 being on a scale of 1—10, where 1 is a purely government agency 

 like the Social Security Administration, and 10 is a Boeing or a 

 Weyerhaeuser, we assessed ourselves to be a 2 or a 3 presently. 

 This is hardly your typical government agency, but still more over 

 on the administrative agency side. Our goal in the Competitiveness 

 Project is to get to a 6 or 7. It is no accident we said our goal was 

 6 or 7, and not 10. 



We have a whole host of public responsibilities that are far wider 

 than our commercial business responsibilities: Environmental re- 

 sponsibilities, resource acquisition responsibilities, whistleblower. A 

 variety of things are there that we need not just to be mindful of 

 but we need to be full and faithful executors of, or we simply will 

 not be successful in canying out and retaining the regional public 

 trust that has been vested in us. 



Mr. DeFazio. There was one thing I did want to cover under the 

 financial aspects, you know, we had a lot of discussion earlier this 

 year in the region about your probability, your reserves, and what 

 percentage probability you should have regarding federal pay- 

 ments. It was generally, as I understand, established that there 

 would be 95 percent probability of full payment of the federal obli- 

 gations in the way you drew up your budget. 



How might that change under the regime of private financing, 

 since that was a driver in the reserves which were a partial driver 

 in the rates? 



Mr. Hardy. I don't think it will change at all. Our long-term goal 

 is 95 percent. The present rate case is at 85 percent, given the com- 

 promises we had to make to get there. But the percentage of repay- 

 ment is really the probability of repajmnent in each particular year. 

 Which is not particularly giffected by the type of outstanding debt 

 and the vehicle refinancing. It is much more a function of near- 



