U.S. Mail

If you live on a back road in rural America, chances are you don’t see a UPS or FedEx truck very often. Where delivery to isolated communities is implemented by private delivery services, it often isn’t cheap. Here’s a note off of UPS’ website: Providing service to and from less populated or accessible domestic and international areas carries higher operating costs. The delivery and extended area surcharges are assessed to more accurately reflect the cost of providing service to these areas.

FedEx has comparable pricing policies. U.S. postal rates are fixed, and yes, they are subsidized by the federal government. Sure, occasionally, when there is no receptacle for a large package or where it must be signed for, a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) carrier will leave a note for the recipient to come to a local delivery point where the package can be retrieved. But with very few exceptions, USPS works amazingly well.

Every day, except Sunday, the USPS sorts about 700,000,000 pieces of mail! Even Amazon Prime uses the USPS, a fact which makes Trump’s blood boil; Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, is not only a constant critic and contributor to the Democratic Party but owner of the hyper-anti-Trump Washington Post. Still, the USPS is about as politically neutral as you can get.

The USPS has run a deficit for a very long time. Stamps and shipping rates would have skyrocketed if the rates reflected actual costs. But that deficit sits as a debt against the USPS with a pension prefunding requirement (not imposed on other federal agencies) on top of that. It is precisely those obligations that give Donald Trump an opening to stop “vote-by-mail” – his obsession – by requiring the USPS to pay (raising postal rates to unaffordable) or shut down.

“The USPS is projecting a $13-billion revenue loss tied to the pandemic and an additional $54 billion in losses over 10 years, Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan told lawmakers in April. At the same time, it has a longer-term burden: a mandate imposed by Congress in 2006 that it pre-fund the retirement benefits of its 630,000 employees, a requirement not imposed on other federal agencies.

“The Trump administration has blocked access to a $10-billion line of credit made available in the recently enacted federal stimulus packages. But last month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Postal Preservation Act, which would make an emergency appropriation of $25 billion and require oversight of the funding by the Postal Service inspector general. Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said the agency finds itself on a precipice.

“‘The post office belongs to everybody,’ he said. ‘If there’s not genuine relief … then the whole question of whether the post office as a public entity can continue to serve the people on an equal basis is going to be up for grabs probably by early fall.’” Los Angeles Times, June 7th.

Unfortunately, Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), is hellbent in opposition to that Postal Preservation Act. The Trump-McConnell cabal wants to shut down the possibility of vote-by-mail balloting, a longstanding practice in many states, in the only legal way they see as possible. Shut down the whole USPS. Not even allowing that rescue bill to reach the Senate floor for a vote. That so many of Trump’s constituents are in rural communities where the U.S. Mail is a lifeblood delivery system doesn’t seem to matter. McConnell requires a huge concession from the Democrat-led House of Representatives to even entertain that rescue package for the USPS. Anger everywhere is simmering.

But Americans love the USPS and always have. “The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) remains the top-rated agency, with 74% saying it is doing an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ job. This conforms with its No. 1 status in all prior years Gallup measured it, including 2014, 2017 and 2018.” Gallup.com, May 13, 2019. Benjamin Franklin was our first Postmaster General, appointed by the Second Continental Congress on July 26, 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence.

“Today, the United States has over 40,000 post offices and the postal service delivers 212 billion pieces of mail each year to over 144 million homes and businesses in the United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, the American Virgin Islands and American Samoa. The postal service is the nation’s largest civilian employer, with over 700,000 career workers, who handle more than 44 percent of the world’s cards and letters.” History.com. It was also the second federal agency ever created.

We are living in severely troubled times. We are separated by a killer pandemic and a great polarized political divide, evidenced by the roiling wave of protests in support of Black Lives Matter and the harsh contrasting “law and order” responses in too many communities. But whatever our differences, there is one federal agency charged with maximizing communication among and between all Americans: the highly revered United States Postal Service. Let’s keep it that way.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this one more effort by the great destroyer and disruptor of necessary federal institutions, Donald John Trump, that must be stopped by popular outcry.