Follow up to previous postings on the United States Postal Service, via Federal Times: “U.S. Postal Service leaders are poised to forgo legal obligations next month by skipping a $5.5 billion payment for retiree health care, but even that unprecedented step won’t buy the flailing mail carrier much time, one of its top officials said last week. Without that action and congressional relief on other fronts, the Postal Service will at best stay solvent only until next August, Deputy Postmaster General Ron Stroman said in an interview with Federal Times. That sudden sense of urgency — driven both by frustration at congressional inaction and a cash crunch worsening faster than expected — may help to explain a dramatic burst of restructuring proposals. For the first nine months of fiscal 2011, the Postal Service’s operating losses totaled more than $5.5 billion. Financial managers expect to tap out a $15 billion line of credit from the Treasury Department by the end of next month. Despite constant cost-cutting, the agency’s financial condition is reaching a “crisis level,” according to the Government Accountability Office. Postal managers now want to slash the size of the career workforce, which now totals about 560,000, by about 40 percent in the next few years.”