Don’t let the news cycle make you forget about the Postal Service
Near the end of the 1947 movie “Miracle on 34th Street,” the defense attorney uses the fact that the US Post Office (as it was known then) delivered mail addressed to Santa Claus to his client clearly demonstrates “…the Post Office, a branch of the federal government, recognizes this man,
Kris Kringle, to be the one-and-only Santa Claus!” The case is won on the clear connection between the Post Office and its role as “an efficiently run organization [whose] postal laws and regulations make it a criminal offense to willfully misdirect mail.” Were that is was still true today.
I recently wrote to my Republican Senator, a man who has not held an in-person town hall meeting for at least 7 years, to request that he put on his big boy pants and start addressing the issues associated with the recent sabotage of US Postal Service operations. Two weeks later, I got an email response from his office, contradictorily explaining to me that the USPS runs a debt and that the taxpayers shouldn’t be responsible for it, and that no money additional money is needed anyhow because the USPS has a lot of cash on hand, and that they need to make structural changes to prevent going bankrupt. I suspect the response was designed to overwhelm me. Good luck with that. I felt it was time for some data and facts to address his word salad.
I am somewhat aware of the history of the USPS and the nature of its current financial challenges. Having spent time in the paper industry, I remember the devasting impact on mail volume when magazine distributors were required to admit that you did not need to buy subscriptions for a chance to win their contests. I saw how digital communication reduced the volume of mail, and I saw how each rate increase resulted in thinner papers and fewer publications. The USPS has struggled for years with a model that requires it to serve the nation, including the unique challenges of both densely populated cities and remote rural outposts. And despite the fact the USPS net operating income has been positive every year since 2012, the financial troubles of the USPS have generated numerous government reports with modification proposals. The Trump administration has done work on this as well. Two notable documents from the Trump administration are the 2018 Treasury Department Task Force on the USPS (https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/USPS_A_Sustainable_Path_Forward_report_12-04-2018.pdf) and the White House paper Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century (https://www.performance.gov/GovReform/Reform-and-Reorg-Plan-Final.pdf).
The Treasury Task Force recommended that the USPS and Congress work to overhaul the USPS operating model in order to return it to sustainability. It is interesting that the team referred to the model as a “business model” as opposed to a “service model”; doing so eases the way to their recommendations by weakening the barrier between a national service obligation and the financial engineering preferred by the Team. Both administrative and legislative actions were proposed to address the challenges without infusion of taxpayer support or disruption of service. Those recommendations can be summarized as:
1) Addressing changes in institutional governance to provide better strategic guidance to the Postmaster
2) Better defining the service obligation of the USPS to enable changes in the monopoly status of the USPS and rethink government protection of USPS services
3) Optimizing its pricing in relation to the market
4) Cost-cutting strategies commensurate with the change in market conditions including the use of private sector partners in areas such as processing and sorting (italics added by the author)
5) Cutting labor costs and restructuring the retiree health benefits requirement
6) Exploration of new revenue stream opportunities, including licensing access to the mailbox to private industry (italics added by the author)
If you squint, you can see a couple of these recommendation being implemented in the elements of the current USPS debacle. Most notably, the above recommendations open the door to privatization of such activities as mail processing, sorting and ownership of the mailbox volume. On the other hand, disruption of service is explicitly forbidden in implementation of a recommendation. The assumption is that any attempt to drive change with a degradation of service will be an option poorly conceived and implemented.
The section of the White House Government Solutions document concerning the USPS created the Task Force and defined its limits. But the White House document was clear on its objective: “A privatized Postal Service would have a substantially lower cost structure, be able to adapt to changing customer needs and make business decisions free from political interference, and have access to private capital markets to fund operational improvements without burdening taxpayers.” Despite the clarity of the objectives from the White House, the Task Force seems to have been less comfortable with privatization as a complete solution to the challenges, or at least was more skillful in parsing its words to cover up the true objective.
The Task Force may have been forced to take a more nuanced approach in its recommendations because there is a third document that must be honored when dealing with the USPS: Federal Law 39 USC § 101 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/101). Within that law, section 101(a) states that “The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.” Nowhere does this law specify that the USPS must run a profit or break even. In fact, the language makes it clear that the service is to be “supported by the people,” and clause (b) guarantees that “no small post office shall be closed solely for operating at a deficit.” Nonetheless, the costs of USPS operation need to be found somewhere. One may make a case that the USPS cost should be borne only by the people who use the service, but that is a nonsensical argument, inconsistent with the rest of government service. I don’t buy goods made by many of the companies bailed out in the PPP, but I do expect, as a citizen, to do what is best for the country as a whole and pay my fair share to support my rights as a citizen.
The Treasury Task Force makes an attempt to support the White House position on privatization. They posit that other industrialized countries have successfully privatized their national mail service. This point is interesting, but disingenuous and misleading. The USPS represents a Federal Government obligation under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 7 of the US Constitution, so privatization is not an obvious option. Furthermore, each of the countries listed in the report that have privatized postal services are geographically smaller than the US. The larger countries on the list are even less privatized than the US mail system is currently. Those same countries with privatized mail also have strict gun control regulations, but that is not a compelling argument for ignoring the US Constitution’s Second Amendment as is being contemplated for the Constitution’s post office clause. The same countries with privatized postal service also provide universal healthcare, but I don’t recall hearing the Trump administration arguing for it in the US in order to keep up with the rest of the industrialized world.
39 USC §101 (e) states that “In determining all policies for postal services, the Postal Service shall give the highest consideration to the requirement for the most expeditious collection, transportation, and delivery of important letter mail.” Based on this clause, one would expect that a Postmaster General would pay close attention to optimizing the delivery of mail, and not merely the cost of doing so. Instead, this Postmaster, Mr. DeJoy, has taken steps that have resulted in a 15% reduction in on-time delivery of the mail. As such, his actions are in clear violation of the intent of the law. My Senator went so far as to call it a conspiracy theory that this service failure has happened at the same time that the President is actively suing to prevent mail-in voting. He argues this is just coincidental timing that there should be a service drop in urban areas so close to an election where an extraordinary number of ballots will be mailed to polling places. Perhaps he is correct. If so, I would hope, given the concern that he and his Republican colleagues now seem to have over the unfortunate role of conspiracy theories in modern political discourse, that the Republican Senators would publicly rebuke Sen. Johnson and Sen. Grassley for their blatant use of Russian-promulgated conspiracy theories in an attempt to smear Vice President Biden, and that they would also openly disavow the absurd and dangerous QAnon statements about Democrats.
I will submit that not all things that quack like a duck or swim like a duck are actually ducks. Maybe there is no bad intent underlying these recent USPS decisions. So, we must search for an alternative explanation. I can easily come up with 3 possible options:
1) There is an attempt to kneecap the USPS to make it easier to make a privatization case. The idea of severely damaging the USPS ability to efficiently process and sort the mail can weaken resolve against privatization. The Task Force has recommended it, the White House is hoping to implement it, and taking sorting machines offline can enable it. Kneecapping is similar to the strategy of corporate raiders, so it would not be difficult to imagine that this administration’s cast of characters is trying the same gambit. From such activities are created oligarchs who control essential government activities for their personal gain.
2) Mr. DeJoy is grossly incompetent in his job. I have run large businesses with significant logistical components, and I can assure you that if I had exhibited as little knowledge of my organization as he has demonstrated, I would have been terminated. If he is a logistics expert, as he claimed to Congress, and he implemented policies that resulted in an immediate 15% reduction in quality, his credentials should be considered suspect. It is hard to argue in favor of the efficacy of a system that involves taking automation offline and destroying the machines, eliminating overtime, sending empty trucks on lengthy routes, and having mail build up at sorting facilities (my local branch reports that they are 3 days behind in delivery and the office that sorts outgoing mail is up to 3 weeks behind). His job performance leads one to reach the conclusion that Mr. DeJoy is willfully blind, incompetent, or both.
3) The intent is not to impact mail-in ballots, but the result of these changes is an unintended consequence that serves the President’s articulated agenda to suppress the vote. I do not believe there is an evil genius at work- just an opportunistic con artist with ideologically challenged enablers in the Senate and House.
We do not need to decide which of the 3 options (or combination of them) is at play, but instead to make certain that something is done to resolve the problem. Yes, this is about prescription medications, Social Security checks, and perishable mail allowed to rot. But mostly it is a profound threat to our democracy and the binding together of our nation. We must not let our guard down. We must not let this become yet one more story of outrage that lasts for 3 news cycles. We cannot be distracted by the many new outrages that will consume the press in the coming days. We need instead to watch what happens, not what is said. When the administration sues states to prevent making mail-in voting easier, when providing drop boxes for ballots is being challenges, when states with strong Republican leanings are considered to have “good” voting laws and other states are considered in violation for implementing the same rules, it is time for us to rise up and call BS on the administration. Politicians respond to pressure, and we must keep the pressure on them. Or we risk drifting toward our doom.
