There's two separate things here:
(1) Book profit: it appears that they're arguing if you ignore pension cost the USPS is profitable. But that's a meaningless point. Its like saying if you ignore what they spend on gas then they'd be profitable. Obviously you can't just ignore costs when calculating profit. These pension obligations are real costs that have to be accounted for.
(2) Cash flow: This is where pension prefunding comes into play. The USPS is running out of cash and if they didn't have to save it would take them longer to do so. But since they're not actually making the payments the law doesn't impact their cash position.
The USPS has about a 100 billion dollars in pension liability that they can't pay. And they haven't actually made money in like 15 years. Tax payers are on the hook for that and the amount they're on the hook for goes up by billions every year.
From the postmaster general:
>. In order to ensure that we had sufficient liquidity to fulfill our primary statutory mission of providing universal postal service, we were forced to default on $33.9 billion in mandated prefunding payments for RHB for the years 2012 through 2016. Additionally, we did not make $6.9 billion in payments due to OPM in both 2017 and 2018 for normal costs and amortization of RHB, Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), and Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) unfunded liabilities. Without these defaults, the deferral of critical capital investments, and the aggressive management actions described above, we would not have been able to pay our employees, our suppliers, or deliver the mail.
>Due to the factors outlined above, we do not have sufficient cash to meet all of our existing legal obligations, fully pay down our debt, and maintain a sufficient level of liquidity to ensure continuity of postal operations and meet our universal service obligation.
https://about.usps.com/news/testimony/2019/pr19_pmg0430.htm
(1) Book profit: it appears that they're arguing if you ignore pension cost the USPS is profitable. But that's a meaningless point. Its like saying if you ignore what they spend on gas then they'd be profitable. Obviously you can't just ignore costs when calculating profit. These pension obligations are real costs that have to be accounted for.
(2) Cash flow: This is where pension prefunding comes into play. The USPS is running out of cash and if they didn't have to save it would take them longer to do so. But since they're not actually making the payments the law doesn't impact their cash position.
The USPS has about a 100 billion dollars in pension liability that they can't pay. And they haven't actually made money in like 15 years. Tax payers are on the hook for that and the amount they're on the hook for goes up by billions every year.
From the postmaster general:
>. In order to ensure that we had sufficient liquidity to fulfill our primary statutory mission of providing universal postal service, we were forced to default on $33.9 billion in mandated prefunding payments for RHB for the years 2012 through 2016. Additionally, we did not make $6.9 billion in payments due to OPM in both 2017 and 2018 for normal costs and amortization of RHB, Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS), and Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) unfunded liabilities. Without these defaults, the deferral of critical capital investments, and the aggressive management actions described above, we would not have been able to pay our employees, our suppliers, or deliver the mail.
>Due to the factors outlined above, we do not have sufficient cash to meet all of our existing legal obligations, fully pay down our debt, and maintain a sufficient level of liquidity to ensure continuity of postal operations and meet our universal service obligation.
https://about.usps.com/news/testimony/2019/pr19_pmg0430.htm