The US Postal Service is facing its greatest fiscal crisis in its 228-year history. Business have been dropping far less mail into the postal system during the pandemic. The postal service has lost billions in income as a result and the US Post Office is on the brink of financial collapse. Yet republicans seem indifferent to the agency’s problems and it appears Trump feels hostility to the US Postal Service.
The US Post Office delivered 54 million pieces of mail in 2019 to all addresses in the US. No private company offers such service.
The survival of the Post Office has become a partisan issue unfortunately and Americans need to decide if they want mail service to end permanently in the United States. The Post Office is authorized in the US Constitution and mail service is available even in the most rural and remote parts of the United States. The Post Office employs about 500,000 people and pays about $4 billion dollars in salaries and benefits each month.
The Post Office is not a taxpayer funded agency. It pays for itself with postage sales and would be close to making a profit if Congress hadn’t mandated that it fund its pension programs 75 years into the future. The Post Office is required, under a 2006 law, to establish a $72 billion-dollar fund for future pensions, something no other agency or business has to do. Without this mandate the Post Office would be operating with a substantial buffer.
Democrats in Congress have been advancing a bill to repeal the pension fund mandate. Most recently the USPS Fairness Act passed the House with more than 100 republican votes but has not been taken up by Mitch McConnel in the Senate. Some republicans have long felt the Post Office should be turned into a private company, likely meaning the end of mail service in rural areas where the cost of delivery is high.
To enhance revenues, the Post Office could expand its services It could offer public banking, particularly to be in rural areas. Many rural residents have limited access to banks and publicly owned banks have succeeded in Europe and North Dakota. Post offices could fill a gap in tiny towns or in cities where many people lack bank accounts. Immigrants would also benefit.
The pandemic has thrown the Post Office into public view as states struggle with their plans for the general election in November. Having the public gather at polls could spread the coronavirus as it did in the Wisconsin primary election this spring. States like Oregon, Colorado, and Washington already have vote-by-mail systems as do 19 other states and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested the whole country should vote by mail this fall to protect public health. However, states run elections and these decisions would be made on the state level.
Pelosi has science on her side in her vote by mail proposal, but republicans are not supportive because their efforts to limit voting by key blocks of voters like minorities, students and the elderly depend on various tactics based on in-person polls. In recent elections republicans have limited the number of polls in minority and heavily democratic areas, causing long lines and long delays for voters. This year the GOP had planned to deploy tens of thousands of “poll monitors” to polling places to perform various tasks related to suppressing the vote. Republicans have also instituted voter ID laws to prevent the poor and elderly from voting and they want to limit polls near universities where young people overwhelmingly vote for democrats.
For his part, Donald Trump has wanted to Post Office to go away for some time. He said: “They had things, levels of voting that if you ever agreed to, you would never have a Republican elected in this country again.” He was referring to mail voting, so clearly, he feels threatened by increased levels of voter participation that mail voting could produce. He has also repeatedly mentioned the low postal rates that parcel shippers like Amazon pay. Trump dislikes Amazon because Jeff Bezos, the company’s owner also owns the Washington Post which is critical of Trump’s behavior and views. So, Donald Trump takes the Postal Service personally and has refused to allow increased funding or pension relief, regardless of the consequences for the American population.
Some republicans favor mail in voting and have promoted it to insure that their voters participate.
If you are concerned about the survival of the Post Office, you might write to Congress and ask them to support bills that would repeal the US Postal Service pension mandate. Past efforts to repeal have garnered bipartisan support and this appeal to fairness could be attached to a successful pandemic relief bill this summer.
Tom Ribe
Fun fact: Did you know that in many parts of the world, insect populations have declined more than 40%? Insects are critical to all functioning ecosystems and agriculture depends on a diversity of insects to produce our food.
