TIME
August 17, 1992 12:00 AM EDT
Marvin T. Runyon may never get his mug on a commemorative stamp, but in just one month on the job as Postmaster General, he has already had a bigger impact on the Postal Service’s bottom line than the popular Elvis issue. Last Friday, in a dramatic bid to stem 10 straight years of red ink and bureaucratic bloat, he announced cuts of about 30,000 managerial jobs — including more than half of the top 42 posts — over the next three months, and a major restructuring of the way the service is run.
Known as “Carvin’ Marvin” during his tenure as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Runyon will have his hands full trying to remold the way 750,000 employees handle (and sometimes mishandle) 540 million pieces of mail each day. When legislators set up the Postal Service as a government-sponsored corporation in 1971, they naively predicted an end to taxpayer subsidies. But the last time the service broke even was in 1982; the projected deficit for this year alone is $2 billion.
Runyon hopes to meet his target with incentives for early retirement, but some layoffs seem unavoidable. Even so, union leaders applauded the fact that Marvin started carvin’ from the top.
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