Building Back Better: The Postal Service Needs Some Love
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has announced a 10-year plan for his agency that includes longer first-class delivery windows, reduced post office hours and higher postage prices.
These are just the latest steps in a decades-long effort coming from the right to downsize the U.S. Postal Service, one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the Constitution conservatives claim to revere.
What started out as a libertarian wet dream became reality in 2006 with passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) in 2006, requiring the Postal Service to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056.
No other public agency or private enterprise is bound by this sort of mandate, the costs of which have ensured deep deficits in recent years. The law also barred “non postal services” such as offering banking services or opening cafes at post offices.
How do I know this was a libertarian attack on an essential democratic institution?
It’s simple. These changes occurred under the leadership of James C. Miller III, who functioned for 32 years as an advisor and key player in the political arm of the Koch family empire.
In 1976, Charles Koch became the biggest funder of the Libertarian Party, which then added abolishing the US Postal Service to its platform.
From a July 2020 report by Lisa Graves at True North Research for In The Public Interest:
Long before Miller had an official role governing the Postal Service, privatizing the agency was part of his extreme ideological agenda. For example, in 2001, Miller—as a director of Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy—chaired discussions at the Koch-founded Cato Institute pushing privatization.
That became the book: “Mail at the Millennium: Will the Postal Service Go Private?” In 1990, as Chairman of the Board of Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy, he gave a presentation at Cato titled “The Future of the Postal Service: Continued Rate Increases or Competition?”
He told Reason magazine in 1989 when he was a “counselor” to Koch’s Citizens for a Sound Economy that: “We ought to privatize the U.S. Postal Service. There is no reason why the Postal Service should remain part of the federal government. The constitution of the United States authorizes, but does not mandate, that there be a U.S. postal service.”
In July 1988, as the director of OMB, Miller headlined an event for Cato titled “Privatization and the Postal Monopoly.” Inside that event at the luxurious Willard Hotel, Miller urged competition by the private sector for first class mail and repeal of what is known as the “private express” statutes. The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) picketed outside.
This effort at eviscerating the agency has implications going way beyond the usual (untruthful) arguments about fiscal prudence; it amounts to an attack on the web of societal services involved in serving the public.
An inscription above the old Washington Post Office, now home to the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, says a letter carrier is not only the “consoler of the lonely”—especially apt in these times of social distancing—but also the “enlarger of the common life.”
For much of our nation’s history, the Postal Service social and civic purpose—connecting people to each other and fostering a well-informed citizenry— has been recognized as a vital part of our democracy.
President George Washington even went so far as to propose that newspapers be delivered free of charge. Although he failed to gain enough support in this quest, the Postal Service Act of 1792 established a uniformly low rate for newspapers, even those critical of the government.
The USPS originally delivered mail 7 days a week until 1912, despite an attempt to end it in 1828 due to religious leaders complaining about gatherings at local post offices cutting into attendance at Sunday church services.
Today the postal service functions as part of our emergency and national security infrastructure. During natural disasters it has served to reconnect displaced persons, distribute relief funds, and deliver medicine and other supplies. Despite the risk to workers, postal deliveries have continued uninterrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
President Donald Trump hated the very idea of the US Postal Service.
From the Washington Post:
Soon after taking office in 2017, President Trump seized on the U.S. Postal Service as an emblem of the bloated bureaucracy. “A loser,” he repeatedly labeled one of America’s most beloved public institutions, according to aides who discussed the matter with him.
Allies coddled Trump by telling him the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widespread mail-in balloting fraud — a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence — and the president’s postal outrage coarsened further.
Then Trump complained to senior White House advisers that Jeff Bezos — a presidential foe in part because he owns The Washington Post, whose news coverage the president thought was unfair and too tough on him — was “getting rich” because Amazon had been “ripping off” the Postal Service with a “sweetheart deal” to ship millions of its packages, one of them recalled. They explained that this was not true and that the Postal Service actually benefited from Amazon’s business, the adviser added, but the president railed for months about what he described as a “scam.”
With the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a businessman and Trump loyalist recruited by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the President had somebody in place to dismantle the institution from the inside.
DeJoy was the local finance chairman for the 2020 Republican National Convention and served as one of the 2017 Republican National Committee deputy finance chairmen along with Michael Cohen and Elliot Broidy.
Since Republicans have now decided that mail in voting is no longer in their interest, they have even more motivation to degenerate mail delivery.
Privatization and downsizing the USPS also serves to undermine the economic security of segments of society not generally considered to be supportive of drowning government in a bathtub.
With nearly 500,000 workers, the Postal Service is the second largest civilian employer in the U.S. It provides stable “middle class ” jobs with good benefits—especially compared to the biggest civilian employer, Walmart, which is subsidized to the tune of more than $6 billion a year in public assistance. Post offices are also richly diverse.
A large percentage of USPS workers are military veterans and/or Black people. Nearly 20% (over 100,000) of USPS employees are veterans. USPS employs veterans at three times their percentage of the U.S population.
Over 20% of USPS employees are Black. And, many are both Black and a veteran. About one in six USPS workers are either Latino or Asian. Over 30% of USPS workers in western states including California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Hawaii are either Latino or Asian. USPS also has an increasing percentage of women employees (40%).
The Postal Service is also the most popular institution in the US. More Americans trust the U.S. Postal Service than any other brand, across all age groups and compared to against huge corporate brands.
If you buy into the ‘government is the enemy’ philosophy central to right wing thinking these days, then undoing the good done by the USPS is a win-win-win: voter suppression, economic racism, and elevating private enterprise at the expense of public good.
President Biden has nominated a former postal union lawyer, a vote-by-mail advocate, and a former deputy postmaster general to sit on the Postal Services' Board of Governors. If confirmed, the board will have the majority needed to mandate a replacement for Louis DeJoy.
That by itself won’t be enough to save the postal service, although it will buy some time. The agency needs to be re-imagined as an entity bigger and better to handle services needed by the public at large for the twenty first century.
It can play a key role in fighting climate change by incentivizing the production of more non-polluting trucks. It can provide financial services to historically underserved communities currently limited to blood-sucking fly-by-night storefront operators. And it can play a bigger role in disseminating information about people-first services.
Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post emailed to you check out the simple subscription form on the right side of the front page.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com