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If you click on the “official organization chart” for the US Postal Service online, you will probably not find any of these 404 page messages. At least, that’s what happened to me when I recently tried to find out what happened at the post office. That’s because a few days ago, whoever does something at the Postal Service changed radically. About 23 executives resigned as were replaced. People are worried because USPS is getting thinner and thinner. It costs money, as do many companies dealing with this coronavirus. It’s led by a new postmaster general, a man known for pushing workers to a breaking point. There is a delay in post office service that you can feel all over the country. And this is all happening because it started to become for many politicians just how essential the email will come in November.
I spoke with Slate’s Jordan Weissmann about what’s going on and what Washington needs to do to get your mail in and guarantee a free and fair election. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jordan Weissmann: Sometime during the coronavirus crisis, it was very clear that the Postal Service was going into financial trouble. And she started asking for a fairly large bailout, with which Donald Trump was not on board at all, because the entire Trump administration hates the Postal Service. Trump has been raving and raving about it for years for all sorts of reasons.
The thing to realize about the Postal Service’s financial problems is that most of them have really been because of this requirement for funding. Back in 2006, Congress decided that the postal service should be worth about 75 years for its retirement benefits.
Mary Harris: Does another organization do this?
No, nobody does this. It’s stupid. It immediately started to go wrong as they passed this and then we got the Great Recession, and the Postal Service was just walloped. And so years and years after that, the Postal Service has suffered this enormous paper loss, the majority of which stems from this demand for pre-financing.
These losses are on paper, but it is still common for them to really invest in modernizing their operations. And they also face legitimate challenges. The volume of first-class emails – just letters – that is, their bread and butter, has dropped enormously, thanks to the internet. That’s a good deal balanced by delivery of packages. And that has helped a lot. That the financial problems of the Postal Service are partly a result of the decline of its core business. But they are also largely a creation of Congress. And that’s why the whole idea of simply abandoning the service altogether to save money on the side is so, so absurd.
Let’s talk about the new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy. As soon as he took the helm, people started ringing the alarms. Explain a little who he is.
Louis DeJoy is a former executive logistics executive. One of the first things most people noticed when he was selected as postmaster general was that he was a major Republican donor. He has apparently donated about $ 2.5 million to the Republican Party. He also donated to Donald Trump’s Victory Fund. People immediately began to worry that Donald Trump was putting a flunky in leadership of the Postal Service. [Editor’s note: The postmaster general is not directly appointed by the president but by the Postal Service Board of Governors, which consists of nine governors appointed by the president.] The reason this concerns people would be because Donald Trump has spent the last several years posting the Postal Service, calling it a joke, and saying how it should increase package prices, mostly because he hates Amazon, to The Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post.
He calls it Jeff Bezos’ delivery boy. He calls it the Amazon scam. He has baselessly talked about how the Postal Service is likely to give Amazon a sweetheart shipping contract. He has held this vendetta against the Postal Service for several reasons for several reasons. Then he also waged the last months war against voting by post. And that’s why we’ve had all these reasons to worry about Donald Trump’s bad intentions for the United States Postal Service. And then he places this man who looks a lot like a flunky who contains it.
When I saw this story, I wanted a better picture of how postmen thought of Louis DeJoy.
They were not happy! He is not a pro-labor. And that is one of the core tensions between Conservatives and the Postal Service. Why many conservatives despise the Postal Service is because it is an enormous, enormously unoriginal workforce. They see it in many ways as the enemy, and there is a racial element to this, because it is a large union working group with many Black employees. Conservatives wanted to spin and privatize it and break up the union for years. This man they have in mind is kind of the antithesis of what the Postal Service stands for. He is a former executive private logistics manager of the union. It’s quite the fox in the lead of the hen house.
Let’s explain exactly what he did when he took this job, because very soon the organization started making up.
Within about a month of arrival, he announced an “operational pivot.” No one ever wants to hear about an operational pivot. It was a series of austerity measures. He said there would be no overtime pay. He told letter carriers that they did not have to return to pick up emails that had to be left on the factory floor. If they could not make it in one trip, they would just leave it there. You make your one scheduled delivery and if things do not fit on the truck, too bad, we will get it the next day.
Is there a benevolent interpretation of this?
The most benevolent interpretation is that he is trying to save some money for the Postal Service, because it has had these big ‘losses’ in the past decades and it is time for it to become more efficient and lose less money. But even that is extremely penny-wise and pound-foolish. These changes have resulted in massive backlogs in email that undermine people’s confidence in the Postal Service’s ability to do its basic work. If you are trying to fix an organization and get it in shape in the long run, this is not the approach you should take.
And we really need to explain explicitly why many politicians think about this in terms of elections, because in 34 states you not only have to postmark your absent vote by election day. It must be received by election day. That you can see how a well-meaning person could deliver their vote honestly, and it would not reach the time yet at the destination.
There are concerns about whether people will get their vote on time and whether they can deliver it on time to the provincial election bureau. We have already seen some discouraging signs, for example with the Michigan primary, where some people did not get their vote literally the day before. There have been signs that this is not an imaginary problem, that this is a real and present danger, and DeJoy has so far given absolutely no signal that he has any real plan to solve this problem.
Congress could come out here for an election disaster by making the Post Office recovery a sticking point of the next coronavirus relief package. But it will cost more than just money, right?
It’s pretty obvious at this point that just giving the USPS more money is not good enough, because it’s not clear that the Trump administration like Louis DeJoy would actually use the money. If Democrats and Republicans can reach some sort of reach over coronavirus relief, that bill should include a bailout for the Postal Service that provides one, more money and, two, the Postal Service tells how to use the money and how it must restore service. And should make the delivery faster back to where it was. And prioritize ballots. When I discovered while talking to some experts, there were all sorts of backhanded ways in which the Trump administration could, in principle, convince anyone that Congress wanted to give it, if they were not careful and did not place any restrictions.
Is it crazy to think that Republican Democrats might want to help save the Postal Service?
It crossed my mind. I do not know. It’s hard. There is also currently a large contingent of the party who are actually happy to simply not pass a bill to treat coronavirus relief at this point.
But the USPS is the most popular federal agency, as is more popular than parks, more popular than NASA.
But again, you have to realize that they really hate the Postal Service. Lots of paint-in-the-wool conservatives, really not fun. But I think the reason some conservatives want to fix this problem is that Republicans are afraid that their older voters in places like Florida will be shocked by this because they rely on voting by mail. We saw a bit of movement about this from Trump, where after months and months of chatting about how voting by mail was unreliable and fraudulent, he suddenly turned course and said, except in Florida! In Florida, the voice over mail is great. They have an established system and absinthe moods are completely safe there.
And that, of course, is where the president is voting. With the post.
And has a while. And so it was stupid. And it clearly shows how some Republicans whistle in his ear, Hey, maybe you can help us with this too. And so maybe, just maybe, that provides an opening to actually try to take action to what is now wrong with the Postal Service. But I would not count a large hand of Republicans here. Let’s put it this way. There should be as much volume about this as soon as possible. If I’m the Democrats now, I’m just talking every day about how Donald Trump is sabotaging the Postal Service.
Much of DeJoy’s criticism from postal experts was that he was talking about the USPS as a company. But they say it’s not a business, it’s a service – it’s a Post Office. Are you buying it? Do you agree with that?
Yes, it’s a service. It’s in the goddamn Constitution. For various reasons, the Post Office is treated as an independent agency that must be independent. And I do not think it’s completely crazy to look to the Post Office for some kind of proportionality. You don’t want to spend taxpayer dollars that deeply subsidize Amazon supplies. Private company customers and such are likely to pay their fair share. But at the same time, there is no reason not to treat e-mail as a government service. There is no reason to think of it as a for-profit entity. If you believe in government services, the Postal Service is kind of the original. It’s the thing that made this great sprawling country actually into something that approached a uniform whole – that you could send letters about it and the government would carry them. That, yes. I think treating it like a business is a little basic and a little wrong, and it tells you a lot about the people who do that. They can not think of anything as just a public good.
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or sign up for What Next on Apple Podcasts, Cloudy, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Update, August 10, 2020, at 2:30 p.m .: This article has been updated to make clear how the postmaster general has been appointed.
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