Never on Saturday?

"The Postal Service is going to cost more and provide less service, with larger subsidies. There isn 't much happy about it from now to the end of the century. "

That was the somewhat despairing word last week from David Minton, the executive director of a blue-ribbon commission that Congress set up last year to determine what, if anything, could be done to increase the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service and reduce the burden it places on taxpayers. The commission will transmit its findings to Congress this week. Key recommendation:

in order to cut costs, the Postal Service should stop delivering mail on Satur days. Distressing finding: even if it does that, and gets an increase in its subsidy from the Government, the cost of a first-class stamp will probably climb from the present 13-c- to 22-c- by 1985.

The nine-member commission, headed by retired Chicago Banker Gaylord Freeman, estimates that dropping Saturday deliveries would save the Postal Service $412 million a year. The commission will also recommend further mechanization of mail handling to save $134 million annually, and suggest other improvements in management and productivity that would save $78 mil lion. Total savings: $624 million annually. Also proposed is the gradual elimination of subsidized postal rates for nonprofit organizations.

Even with all those savings, says the commission, the Postal Service will need more money from the Treasury. Labor costs continue to rise, and there is also the expensive business of distributing mail door to door throughout the country. At present, besides the income it derives from the sale of stamps and from special fees to people and businesses that use the mails, the Postal Service gets two subsidies paid out of tax money. One is a varying yearly appropriation that is supposed to hold down rate increases; this year it is $792 million. In addition, the service now gets a fixed "public service" subsidy limited by law to 10% of the 1971 Postal Service budget, or $920 million. The commission will suggest that the public service subsidy be set in each year at 10% of the previous year's budget. In 1977 that would amount to $1.6 billion.

Rare Whimsy. The commission contends that it has public support for at least some of its findings. Of 3,000 people questioned in an A.C. Nielsen Co. survey that it commissioned, 79.5% were willing to give up Saturday mail delivery to keep costs down. The public, the survey found, is most interested in the dependability of mail delivery. The commission will throw in one palliative in its report to Congress: a recommendation that the Postal Service close no more post offices unless there is a vacancy in the postmastership, "or the Army Corps of Engineers floods the area" -- a rare bit of bureaucratic whimsy.

Nonetheless, legislators are likely to take a dim view of the report. Saturday mail delivery in particular is a great favorite of many Congressmen. So, the commission added one more estimate to its findings: if its recommendations are buried, as they may well be, the cost of a first-class stamp by 1985 will rise not just to 22-c- but to 28-c-.

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