Going postal

Will postal workers soon be as insecure as a Cybertruck's body panel?

Whether by chainsaw or sledgehammer, the efficiency ghouls in Washington are already doing violence to labor contracts, making a mockery of the meaning of "legally binding,” and pouring quicklime over the body of legacy principles of due process and the rule of law.

The United States Postal Service may be sacrificed on the holiest of altars: elusive solvency in a profligate nation. By whipping its employees to the tune of "Git Along Little DOGEies," the privatizers think they can whip what they consider a boondoggle into shape.

Our postal service, which predates the Revolutionary War, when we fought against a king centuries before refashioning the throne as a Resolute Desk, has a popularity rating among the public that is at least double the percentage that holds Congress in esteem. And postal employees do work that is far more demanding, varied and sometimes hazardous than is generally realized and they do it with greater attentiveness to duty than have most of our legislators.

And their rounds include rural areas where wolverines and Fed-Ex fear to tread and there are more rattlesnakes than people. And the flat envelope sent through the USPS carries the same postage if sent to a destination 3,000 miles away in a dense forest or mountain peak, as if to your neighbor next door. 

But USPS pay is barely in a middle-class bracket. Privatization of the USPS has been on the backburner for many years. Now it is being fast-tracked with a Muskian vengeance, along with arbitrary cross-agency mass firings of federal employees. 

The latest contemplated scheme is a hostile takeover of the USPS by the Commerce Department, which could swallow and digest it whole or keep it semi-autonomous on a tight regulatory tether.

For over 50 years, the USPS has been an "independent agency under the executive branch, free of direct political control," as the Reuters news service recently put it. That abstraction has been contradicted by the hard knocks of reality. Since the president is the alpha and omega of executive branch authority, his exercise of raw supremacy is infallible. Nine of the 11 members of the agency’s board of governors are appointed by him. Means nothing; he can sack them for sport.

The DOGE hangman has a scaffold. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, a trap door. That act prohibits the closing of any post office simply because it is hemorrhaging money. 

"Bailouts and handouts" are over, squawked House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who habitually sounds the alarm against the domino effect of governmental institutions that have trace elements of mercy in their administration.

Although the USPS has sustained many billions of dollars of long-term unfunded liabilities and debt (perhaps equal to unaccounted-for grants to warring nations abroad), its financial picture, though not rosy, is less pallid, except for mandatory pension and health costs, notes the Washington Post's Jacob Bogage, who warns of the potentially adverse impact on e-commerce, if the Commerce Department absorbs the USPS.

The USPS' problems are attributable largely to sweeping and profound changes beyond its control. They are dragged down by mandates that do not bind companies like FedEx and Amazon. The USPS cannot pick and choose its services on a basis of prospective stock dividends. Their performance should not be assessed by the same criteria as profit-making corporations, which can eliminate less lucrative services that are compulsory for the USPS.

Traditional mail has undergone radical reconstructive surgery in the years since the digitalization of communications and banking. 

Perhaps the idea of franchising mailboxes to private companies should be revived, breaking the USPS's monopoly but partially filling its almost bottomless budget hole. Over the three years prior to 2023, the volume of first-class mail was slashed by half, which amounted to over 50 billion items. Cato Institute reported that the 2023 per capita mail volume was only 37 percent of what it had been three years earlier.

Privatization "could result in higher costs, slower deliveries and reduced services," and because of the USPS's statutory universal service obligation, "risks undermining its role in providing affordable and equitable service nationwide," according to Investopedia.

Outsourcing is the mother's milk of anti-union privatizers.

The USPS may not be moving with the times, but synchronization with the clock and calendar are within management's bailiwick. If the workers had seats at the table, no doubt there would already be remedies in progress. The privatizers don't sincerely want to repair the USPS. They are like the sociopathic nurses we sometimes read about, who pull the plug on recovering patients. 

The USPS can be organically reinvented with some minor skin shedding.  It will never be obsolete, though its managerial culture and operational parameters may be archaic. The Economic Policy Institute suggests that it could "compete with Amazon as a one-step shopping and delivery conduit to independent retailers.”

In an exhaustive report, the EPI observes "The Postal Service is a lifeline in the wake of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and other emergencies. It is a key part of our .. .national security infrastructure … was critical to reconnecting displaced persons, distributing relief funds and delivering medicine."   

Regarding budgetary woes, the EPI observes that the "Postal Service has had to borrow or default on retiree benefit contributions” for many years, due to the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) , which "required the Postal Service to begin prefunding retiree health benefits and pay down these costs within 10 years.” This did much to change the color of the budget ink from black to red. 

It is self-financing, but not allowed to self-determine when prices must be raised, services cut or expanded to more profitable areas, and it must provide services six days a week. It's unfair to demand results from the USPS and hold them accountable for failure to achieve them, when the means to do so are deliberately withheld from them. Congress hogtied the USPS so it cannot move to generate revenue and then blames it for stagnation.

Much of the criticism of the USPS is not driven by good faith but rather is rooted in pro-privatization ideology that is fueled by think tanks, including private equity investors whose partisanship has predetermined their thoughts long before its first brain wave undulated past the starting gate. In 2018, President Donald Trump's Office of Management and Budget sought to sell off the USPS claiming that privatization would reduce costs, make it more adaptable to customer preferences and shift the cost of improvements from taxpayers to profits from capital investments.

In the meantime, it  would sustain it through starvation.

OMB’s functionaries also advocated for reducing customer service based on cost-effectiveness and conforming to a business model that would marginalize labor unions, terminating fundamental member benefits and panning off accumulated pension liabilities to taxpayers in order to make the USPS more attractive for buyers. They demonize "special interests," which for them is code for labor unions. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at the time begged for the destruction of collective bargaining rights for postal employees. 

Privatizing the USPS because it is uneconomic is a logical fallacy that sounds reasonable but leads to erroneous and malicious conclusions. Don't leave it alone. Brace and embrace it.