I love the post office. The Duke of Mar-a-Lago does not. While his undisguised contempt for it is inextricable from his animosity toward Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and The Washington Post, it seems probable that he, on his own, saw it as a potential cash cow, the quasi-governmental entity most ripe for privatization. The timing of this stab at an editorial is noteworthy. It was written within a week or so of the installation of the vile Louis DeJoy as postmaster general by a board subverted by His Eminence’s appointees. As challenging as circumstances have been for the postal service, Mr. DeJoy demonstrated how things can always be made worse. I sent the thing first to The Richmond Times-Dispatch and learned that it could not be accepted because of a six-month moratorium on further submissions after an opinion had been printed. I then tried The Washington Post and The Virginian-Pilot without success.
Save The USPS
The USPS is at a crossroads. It could run out of funds in September.[1] Congressional action, or perhaps inaction, in coming weeks will likely settle its fate. The post office’s unique historical, cultural, and economic contribution to American life has made it a singular institution whose future role in the country’s story deserves sober consideration.
First, a confession: My affection for the post office is immoderate. For an inveterate postcard writer, dispatching a bit of epistolary art to any address in the nation for a mere quarter and a dime is a small repeating miracle.
The postal service’s story is fundamentally America’s story. It was there from the beginning. The Constitution enjoined Congress “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”[2] The post office grew with the nation while driving its development. Winifred Gallagher’s history of the post office details its role in virtually every revolution in communication and transportation – canals, stagecoaches, Pony Express, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, civil aviation. Its expansion of services, especially Free City and Rural Free Delivery, helped define lived experience. It still fulfills its creators’ injunction to “bind the nation together” and inform its citizens. Yet, paradoxically, it is a historical treasure whose history is too little known.[3]
The postal service, moreover, suffers from the widespread misconception that it burdens the taxpayer. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 transformed the US Post Office Department into the USPS and mandated that the agency become financially self-sustaining, a goal achieved in 1982. Congress provides funds only to cover congressionally required free services to the blind and overseas voters, a budgetary pittance. It otherwise finances itself solely through sale of services and products.[4]
The USPS perennially faces financial challenges. The internet has eroded its revenues, a circumstance worsened by the Post Office Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. This lame-duck enactment compelled the USPS to prepay its full liability for retirees’ medical benefits fifty years in advance across a ten-year period. The impact of this abnormal obligation, unprecedented in either private or public sector, was compounded by the 2008-09 financial crisis.[5] The Independent Policy Institute concludes that, had the USPS not been subject to prepayment, it would have been profitable from 2013 to 2018.[6]
Misapprehensions have created space for specious charges regarding the postal service. Some assert that the USPS loses money by billing private carriers such as Amazon below the cost to move their packages and is hemorrhaging revenue. This claim has been debunked. The USPS is legally obliged never to transport parcels below cost; its arrangement with Amazon makes money. Amazon likely enjoys a favorable rate, but critics should remember that discounting of bulk deliveries is a common business practice and that the USPS handles “last mile” delivery, in other words, not from sender to recipient but only from the recipient’s nearest postal distribution center, where Amazon leaves parcels.[7]
These falsehoods likely arise from desire to privatize the USPS. Cogent arguments can be marshaled for that path; however, privatization would undermine a fundamental pillar of the USPS: its universal mandate, the requirement to deliver to every address at a flat rate. If profitability becomes the postal service’s guiding principle, delivery to rural, remote addresses would not pay. Requiring private carriers to honor this mandate could well push them toward bankruptcy.[8]
The coronavirus has worsened the USPS’s position. It could lose $54 billion in revenues,[9] a major factor in its potential insolvency. A $10 billion loan in the CARES Act has mitigated this shortfall but the need to stabilize the agency’s finances is urgent, especially with the anticipated reliance on mail-in ballots in November.[10] It would also be penny wise, pound foolish during historically high joblessness to hobble an employer of 630,000 workers,[11] the vanguard in offering decent jobs to women, minorities, and veterans. Sustaining the USPS would enable it then to address its long-term financial health. Ending the prepayment obligation would free the agency to focus on capital improvements, research and development, and innovation.[12] Introduction of creative services, such as postal banking or the installation in post offices of media hubs with broadband internet and secure email, could secure the bottom line while addressing socioeconomic inequalities.[13]
The postal service, perhaps because its couriers do indeed make their appointed rounds, is taken for granted. It is easy to forget, as Gallagher emphasizes, that it began as the most democratic of institutions in service of a revolutionary notion: free flow of mail and information as the right of every citizen, not a privileged few. There is reason for hope because of the nearly universal fondness for one’s own carrier and post office.
[1] Lauren Fox and Jeremy Herb, “US Postal Service Warns Congress It Could Become Insolvent Amid Coronavirus,” CNN, 10 April 2020 (www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/politics/postal-service-congress-help/index.html [accessed 14 June 2020]).
[2] Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7.
[3] Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America: a History (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).
[4] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, pp. 255-61, 273; Eugene Kiely and D’Angelo Gore, “Trump’s Amazon Attack,” FactCheck.Org, 5 April 2018 (www.factcheck.org/2018/04/trumps-amazon-attack/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Kirsten B. Blom and Katelin P. Issacs, US Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits and Pension Funding Issues, Congressional Research Service Report R43349 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 7 January 2015), p. 1.
[5] Jeff Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office,” The Week, 16 April 2018 (https://theweek.com/articles/767184/how-george-bush-broke-post-office [accessed 3 May 2020]); Matthew Yglesias, “The Debate Over a Post Office Bailout Explained,” Vox, 12 April 2020 (www.vox.com/2020/4/12/21218151/usps-bailout-privatization-amazon-trump [accessed 3 May 2020]); Bill McCarthy, “Widespread Facebook Post Blames 2006 Law for US Postal Service’s Financial Woes,” PolitiFact, 15 April 2020 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/15/afl-cio/widespread-facebook-post-blames-2006-law-us-postal/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Blom and Issacs, US Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits; Al Root, “Why the Stimulus Package Includes $10 Billion for the US Postal Service,” Barron’s, 30 March 2020 (www.barrons.com/articles/the-u-s-postal-service-gets-10-billion-in-the-cares-act-it-needs-the-support-51585489596 [accessed 16 June 2020]).
[6] McCarthy, “Widespread Facebook Post”; Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis–And How to Fix It,” Institute for Policy Studies, 15 July 2019 (https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it/ [accessed 15 June 2020]); Sarah Anderson, Scott Klinger, and Brian Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis – And How to Fix It,” Institute for Policy Studies, February 2020 (updated) (www.inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Manufactured-Postal-Crisis-February-2020.pdf [accessed 15 June 2020]).
[7] Nick Wingfield, “Is Amazon Bad for the Postal Service? Or Its Savior?” New York Times, 4 April 2018 (www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/amazon-postal-service-trump.html [accessed 3 May 2020]); Manuela Tobias, “No, the Postal Service Isn’t Losing a Fortune on Amazon,” PolitiFact, 2 April 2018 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/apr/02/donald-trump/trump-usps-postal-service-amazon-losing-fortune/ [accessed 3 May 2018]); Kiely and Gore, “Trump’s Amazon Attack”; Manuela Tobias, “No, USPS Doesn’t Lose $1.46 on Every Amazon Package,” PolitiFact, 6 April 2018 (www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/apr/06/eric-bolling/usps-amazon-lose-146-every-package-delivers/ [accessed 3 May 2020]); Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office.”
[8] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, p. 281.
[9] “Postmaster General Statement on US Postal Service Stimulus Needs,” USPS (https://about.usps.com/newsroom/statements/041020-pmg-statement-on-usps-stimulus-needs.htm [accessed 3 May 2020]).
[10] Root, “Why the Stimulus Package Includes $10 Billion.”
[11] “The United States Postal Service Delivers the Facts,” USPS, February 2020.
[12] Spross, “How George Bush Broke the Post Office”; Anderson, Klinger, and Wakamo, “How Congress Manufactured a Postal Crisis.”
[13] Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America, pp. 266-7, 282-4.