Let’s say you’re responsible for a mission-critical government agency that is expected in three months or less against an expected national rise in demand while struggling with an existing national emergency.
Would you:
—Institute a reduction in overtime and hiring time, while signaling your tolerance for slower delivery of critical services to customers?
—Radically organize your operation, assign new duties to inexperienced managers and remove the most experienced managers without explanation?
—Describe your actions as an ‘operational pivot’ and choose fights with the people you need to report?
This extraordinary mandate created a financial ‘crisis’ that was used to justify harmful cuts to services and even called for postal privatization.
Institute for Policy Studies, speaking of the mandate that the US Postal Service pre-finances its health care costs
No? Then you’re just not as qualified to run the U.S. Postal Service as Louis DeJoy, the millionaire’s political fundraiser who deals with conflicts of interest that the president has placed through President Trump.
DeJoy has taken over just as the postal service needs to work together to handle a turnout in voting per postal ballot filed by voters envious to report personally to their polling stations due to the outbreak of coronavirus.
Instead of concentrating on what Job One should be, he treated himself like a one-wrecking crew. Coast-to-coast residents have noticed that mail deliveries have slowed down.
In a well-reported poll, Ellie Rushing of the Philadelphia Enquirer documented “some residents who go to the top three weeks without packages and letters, leaving them without medication, wages and bills.”
Where is the mail? It is “stacked in offices, without scanning and not sorted”, while overwhelming postal workers replace without replacements.
Here’s betting that many of my readers have experienced a change in email service, for the worse. At my house, deliveries arrived later and later in the day – on one occasion the mail arrived shortly before nightfall, an eight-hour delay that had not happened at my address in 20 years.
These developments have raised good concerns about whether the U.S. Postal Service will be able – or ready – to handle the burden of mail-in voting this fall.
There is even an unconfirmed report, via the Capitol Forum, that the Postal Service is thinking about charging states the full 55-cent first-class rate to send votes to voters instead of the usual preferred 20-cent rate – expel the rate of passes for passes for states.
DeJoy is the first postmaster general in 20 years not to be promoted within the Postal Service. But he has a lot of experience as head of companies that have competed with the USPS and as an investor in the system’s rivals, including UPS.
He has denied that his management changes have anything to do with obstructing postal delivery before the election, but some of his moves are indistinguishable from steps one would take to obstruct the service. Mostly he reshuffled more than 30 top officials, an action that will inevitably produce unrest from top to bottom.
And if the Postal Service can not handle the elections adequately, then it is democracy that will pay the price.
We have long written about Trump’s infantile hostility to the USPS. By some calculations, it has something to do with the service’s contract to supply packages to Amazon, which was set up by Jeff Bezos, whose property the Washington Post, a consistent Trump critic, puts in Trump’s crawl. . Trump claims that the contract is a sweetheart deal for Amazon, but there is no evidence to support that.
Trump has pushed for the privatization of the Postal Service, even thinking that privatization would almost certainly mean crummy service and huge price increases, making it the hardest route to undermine the documented public admiration for the Postal Service.
Asked to defend his attacks on the U.S. Postal Service, Trump has just lied about them. Again and again.
These attacks are part of the standard Republican approach to public service. Typically, this comes down to “making governments as a company” – in other words, justifying government operations and their very existence on a profit-and-loss basis. If they can not forgo things under these conditions, then they undress.
The problem with this argument is that, by definition, government cannot “act as a company.” Its responsibility is to provide services to people who can not afford to pay for them, to invest in infrastructure when private companies will not (even if business will have the ultimate benefits), and perform other tasks that can not be costly.
Therefore, the cry to form government like a company is always selective. Republicans do not require it to operate militarily as a company, because if it did, we would not have an army. We would never have built Hoover Dam as the interim highway system.
The GOP cry is typically aimed at services for the poor. The ridiculous campaign to impose work requirements on the recipient of Medicaid has been consistently interpreted as an attempt to make Medicaid fiscally “more efficient”. Cuts in food stamps are regularly justified by the inability of the United States to provide food on the table for low-income Americans.
Republican-endorsed cuts in public services were memorably described in 2017 by reps. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) As “cartoon evil.”
He then referred to a GOP proposal to remove minimal essential benefits such as hospitalization and prescription coverage from health plans qualified under the Affordable Care Act – “I can imagine someone crawling their mustache when they drafted it in their secret Capitol lair, “he said at the time.
But the nickname is much more widely used during the Trump era, in which Republicans never raised a finger to protect public goods and programs such as health care, food stamps, housing assistance, and more recently assistance to American families whose budgets for households remained blown. bits due to the outbreak of coronavirus.
In fact, the term is too mild. The onslaught on public services has moved far beyond stripping skills and reached the level of pure, unadulterated malice.
The Postal Service has become a major target of these people. Let’s review the bill with details.
In an internal memo to postal workers that DeJoy published shortly after his appointment in May, he wrote of ‘the’ journey we must take together, for the health and stability of the Post Office ‘and attributed some of the problems with ‘rising costs’.
DeJoy is by no means the only major driver of the Postal Service’s annual shortfall: the unholy requirement, introduced in 2006, that the service applies in advance to its pension costs, a mandate that is not imposed on any other government agency or private corporation.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Washington, the mandate costs the USPS more than $ 4 billion a year. Without this burden, the institute says, “the Post Office would have reported business profits in one of the last six years.” Instead, “This extraordinary mandate created a financial ‘crisis’ that was used to justify harmful cuts to services and even called for postal privatization.”
It is true that first class mail, which was once the bread and butter of the post office, has been declining in the long run. First class post volume peak at 103.7 billion pieces annually in 2001. When Americans switched to automatic bill payment, email and e-vites, volume fell 47% by fiscal 2019 to 54.9 billion.
Package deliveries have taken some of the slack, in price, turnover and increased part of the Post Office’s total revenue in recent years. But delivering packages is also more expensive than delivering letters.
Packages require extra heavier trucks, more personnel and more fuel. Although the Post Office collects more revenue from parcels than ever before, this is not yet fully compensating for the falloff in letter revenue.
That may be a big concern if the Postal Service was a private company, but it is not. It is a government service, and among the virtues of a government service is the service it provides to all citizens, regardless of where they live, even if it cannot be done profitably.
Somewhere in the Trump administration, his Office of Management and Budget described the privatization of the USPS in terms of deceptive merit: ‘A privatized Postal Service would have a substantially lower cost structure, be able to adapt to changing customer needs and business decisions to free political interference. ”
In other words, it would reduce pay and staffing, leaving customers and communities far off the beaten path. This is how free market companies like cable companies work – they serve densely populated areas, but keep remote locations that are costly and difficult to service from their business plans.
We already know how private mail services work. UPS and FedEx provide the necessary examples. To post a first-class letter – perhaps a birthday card to your grandmother – costs 55 sentences, regardless of where you live and where it goes. The minimum charge from FedEx is $ 11 and at UPS $ 30.18, according to their websites.
Shipping an item in a medium US Postal Service mailbox costs $ 15.05, throughout the US. At UPS it is $ 30.81, and at FedEx $ 34.50. The Postal Service will ship its flat-rate large boxes (24 inches by 12 inches by 3 inches) anywhere in the U.S., from Key West, Fla., To Anchorage, for $ 21.10. The same box, shipped from California to southern Michigan, costs $ 36.59 on UPS and $ 34.50 in FedEx. But send it to Anchorage, and the price jumps to $ 49.39 on UPS and $ 52.81 on FedEx, according to their websites.
This is the aspect of universal postal service that Trump and his acolytes overlook. The constitution placed the responsibility for the post in the hands of the post office, at and unfortunately at the instigation of Benjamin Franklin, because the founding fathers saw it as a public service uniting this disparate country into one.
They did not demand that the email pay its own way, and certainly not that they be privatized. The spectacle of the post office being devastated on the eve of a national election would have shocked her. And it would have to shake you. Our whole democracy hangs in the balance.
