WASHINGTON—Congress, especially its ruling Republicans, should not cut federal workers’ comp benefits for federal employees injured on the job, especially injured Letter Carriers, who get hurt far more often than any other group of government workers, says union president Brian Renfroe.
And the danger of injury is only increasing as the Postal Service’s bosses have dragged their feet in addressing two recently rising threats to the Letter Carriers as they make their rounds, the NALC president added: Longer periods of heat and increasing armed robberies carriers are facing.
“The Federal Employees Compensation Act is essential to protecting injured Letter Carriers working for one of America’s greatest institutions, the United States Postal Service,” Renfroe told the House Workforce Protections Subcommittee on May 6.
“Despite our best efforts, workplace injuries in the day-to-day operations of the Postal Service are a fact of life,” Renfroe said. “Vehicle accidents, repetitive motion injuries, heat stroke or frostbite and other injuries caused by weather extremes, assaults by criminals and the more mundane injuries like slips and falls are common features of the working lives of NALC members. Letter Carriers get injured more frequently than nearly all other workers in the federal government or private industry.”
Renfroe made those points at a hearing on the general subject of modernizing FECA, a decades-old law, which, like state workers’ comp laws, is supposed to both pay for medical treatment for a federal worker injured on the job and—if the worker is permanently disabled or dies—provide income support to their families.
Panel Republicans, led by Rep. Ryan McKenzie, R-Pa., say they want to “modernize” FECA. That’s GOP code words for limiting benefits, imposing a one-size-fits-all plan and capping money to injured workers and their families, warned the subcommittee’s top Democrat, Rep. Ilhan Omar, DFL-Minn.
“Federal workers and taxpayers deserve a more efficient and effective program. Working together in a bipartisan fashion, we can create comprehensive changes to ensure the FECA program is meeting the needs of workers and taxpayers,” said McKenzie.
McKenzie fell in line with recommendations from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, many of which point in the direction of cutting workers’ comp costs, Renfroe said.
Many on-the-job injuries
Given the enormous amount of on-the-job injuries the NALC’s active 220,000 carriers and city carrier assistants—trainees in their first Letter Carrier jobs—suffer, the “solutions” would produce a lot of suffering, Renfroe added.
Omar cautioned the object of FECA updating should be “protecting workers, not cutting corners.”
“Too often, decisions about federal workforce policy are made without real engagement with those directly impacted. We need to hear from the workers navigating the claims process, the physicians providing care, and the families who face financial insecurity when benefits are delayed. Their experiences must guide our reforms.
“Now more than ever, we must remember federal workers aren’t just serving the government,” said Omar, in a shot at the GOP Trump regime and its congressional backers. Both use federal workers as a convenient political target, thus pandering to their right-wing voters’ preconceptions.
But those workers, including the Letter Carriers, “are serving all of us,” Omar retorted. “At the very least, they deserve FECA, which is worthy of the services they provide to the public. The tireless and often fearless dedication of our federal workers has a real-world impact on the safety and well-being of our communities.”
Another witness, Luis Santos, the acting Inspector General for the Labor Department, whose Office of Workers Compensation Programs runs the FECA payments, said the real problem isn’t high benefits to workers but corporate rip-offs, particularly by medical providers.
“Since fiscal year 2015, the Office of Inspector General has opened more than 320 criminal investigations involving FECA. Our investigations resulted in indictment and conviction of 322 individuals, including a significant number involving medical provider fraud, producing more than $1.7 billion in monetary results,” Santos said.
Omar agreed. “We all want to use tax dollars responsibly. But the smartest, most cost-effective thing we can do is invest in workplace safety,” the Minnesotan said. “Fewer injuries and illnesses mean fewer claims and lower long-term costs. That’s why prevention—like the proposed OSHA heat stress rule—matters. It isn’t just good policy, it’s common sense.
“Prevention is always cheaper than treatment. And when workers have the training, equipment, and protections they need, everyone benefits. Productivity goes up, injury rates go down, and public trust in our institutions is strengthened.”
Renfroe explained that while the Postal Service employs approximately 600,000 people, his union’s 220,000 members are out in the heat or the cold, especially the heat, in unairconditioned trucks, without water breaks or other relief from ultra-hot days, in the middle of the day when heat is at its height. But the USPS has been dragging its feet on replacing its outdated and unairconditioned vehicles the carriers drive with newer, air-conditioned models.
Though Renfroe didn’t say so, former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a GOP big giver whom Republican President Donald Trump foisted on the Postal Service in spring of 2020, bears a lot of responsibility for that delay. DeJoy stepped down earlier in Trump’s current term.
Tried to push gas guzzlers
DeJoy tried to get USPS to buy gas guzzlers as its new fleet, rather than trucks whose emissions are carbon-free. He also pushed, successfully, for the trucks to be manufactured in a then-unbuilt plant which would employ non-union workers in his native North Carolina, rather than use a retrofitted existing plant in Oshkosh, Wis., whose employees are Auto Workers members.
All that means the Letter Carriers are broiling in the heat. Some 41% of all Federal Employee Compensation Act claims have come from among the Letter Carriers, out of the nation’s two million federal workers and 500,000 USPS workers, Renfroe said. And 42% of benefit payments—some $1.5 billion yearly—went to disabled carriers, families or heirs.
“The Postal Service is a very dangerous place to work. A 2023 USPS Office of Inspector General audit found that between fiscal years 2017-2021, there were between 55,000 and 65,000 industrial accidents each year…That is a lot of accidents. Seventy percent of these accidents were suffered by Letter Carriers.”
And since the Letter Carriers tote pension checks, Social Security checks, medicines, and other items that crooks can turn into ready money, the carriers get robbed of their keys to banks of mailboxes, with the number of robberies doubling in the last five years.
Current federal law treats the assaults and robberies of carriers as misdemeanors, not felonies, and federal prosecutors are loath to probe the cases and take them to trial, except in cases where the carrier winds up seriously injured or dead. The NALC is pushing legislation, HR1065, the Protect Our Letter Carriers Act, which Renfroe advocated, to make such crimes felonies and assign a prosecutor in each U.S. attorney’s office to postal crimes.
“Limiting the dollar amount and duration of benefits, allowing settlements and buyouts, standardizing the rate of compensation regardless of dependent status and limiting the weekly payout amount would all unconscionably shift the costs of the injured or disabled worker’s injury from the federal government onto the worker and their family,” Renfroe told lawmakers.
“NALC opposes, in particular, the recommendations to convert claims for disability to a lower benefit requiring employees to opt for an Office of Personnel Management annuity at age 65, to allow the Postal Service to provide a list of medical providers that injured employees must choose from and to allow apportionments to be factored in.”
Who chooses the doctor to examine the injured worker is also a problem in private industry, particularly in mining. Past congressional testimony showed mine owners sent coal miners, disabled with black lung, to company-paid doctors who knew who signed their checks and diagnosed accordingly. The same pattern occurs in non-union shops, such as Amazon warehouses.
But the real money losses are at a higher level. Santos, the Labor Department’s acting Inspector General, reported his office and the Postal Service’s Inspector General “jointly uncovered a sharp rise in medical fraud related to compounded drugs, especially pain creams.
“Pharmacists create compounded drugs by combining, mixing, or altering the ingredients of commercially available drugs to fit the needs of individual patients. However, without standard pricing rules, they often billed FECA exorbitantly—far beyond the cost of the ingredients,” he explained.
In the latest case, in March 2025, “two Texas pharmacy owners were sentenced for their roles in a $158 million” fraud “through fraudulent claims for prescription compound creams. The owners were sentenced to 210 and 180 months in prison.” They also had to pay more than $115 million and “forfeit $405 million in assets tied to their fraud and money laundering schemes.
“The owners and others conspired to pay doctors millions in bribes and kickbacks to prescribe medically unnecessary, expensive compound creams to injured federal workers, prescriptions then filled by their pharmacies. These compounds were being mixed in back rooms of pharmacies at a cost of around $15 per prescription and then billed to OWCP for as much as $16,000 each.”
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