John Nacion/STAR MAX/IPx
A postal worker in Queens, New York, last week
As the coronavirus crisis kills Americans by the tens of thousands and sends us into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, President Trump has found at least one silver lining: using this opportunity to destroy the United States Postal Service.
That sounds like a bad joke, but that’s where we are. This American treasure, an institution that connects every one of us and should earn the support of every public official no matter their party, is being kicked while it’s down by a petty, vengeful president and a party that will back him in whatever he wants, no matter how destructive.
Before we get to what the Trump administration is doing, let’s establish the context. The USPS has been struggling financially for years, because of declining mail volume but also because of an extraordinary requirement Congress and President George W. Bush imposed on it in 2006. Unlike any other government agency or private company, the USPS is required to prepay health benefits for retirees 75 years into the future. This means that the Postal Service must have funds in reserve to pay for future workers who have not been born yet. This requirement has been an albatross around the neck of the USPS ever since it was implemented, costing billions of dollars every year and making up nearly all of its operating losses, which totaled $8.8 billion in fiscal year 2019.
It’s strange to even mention “losses” when we’re talking about the government. Other federal agencies are not expected to fund their own operations. Nobody asks why the Department of Agriculture didn’t turn a profit last year. The fact that the USPS can come close to profitability while charging only 55 cents to mail a letter across the country is nothing short of astounding. Mail volume has declined in recent years, but the USPS still delivered 142 billion pieces of mail in 2019, around 460 pieces for every one of the over 300 million residential and business addresses it serves.
Libertarians say “FedEx and UPS make profits, so why can’t the Postal Service?” but they fail to explain that those companies make profits by charging you not 55 cents, but around $25 to send a letter coast-to-coast. And unlike the USPS, FedEx and UPS do not have a universal service requirement to deliver to all addresses throughout the country; if it isn’t profitable, the private shippers won’t deliver there. So what does FedEx do if you ask them to send a package to a remote address in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? They take your money, bring the package to the post office, have the USPS deliver it at a much lower rate, and pocket the difference.
The USPS may lose money delivering that package, just as they do operating thousands of post offices in rural areas. They do it because they have a mandate to serve every American, no matter who they are or where they live.
Now comes the coronavirus. While USPS package delivery is more vital than ever, there has been a precipitous drop in mail volume (in particular junk mail and advertising, which have been largely suspended while companies conserve cash), further cutting into postal revenues. Meanwhile, postal workers make their appointed rounds every day, literally risking their lives to deliver your mail. Around the country, they’re testing positive for the virus by the hundreds; at least 19 have already died.
So when the time came to put together a $2.2 trillion rescue package for the American economy, Democrats attempted to add $25 billion to shore up the USPS—less than the $29 billion in grants the airlines ended up getting. Then President Trump stepped in.
“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it,” an administration official told The Washington Post. Negotiators eventually decided to allow the USPS to borrow $10 billion from the Treasury Department, but it would have to be paid back. “A committee aide said [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin told lawmakers during negotiations: ‘You can have a loan, or you can have nothing at all.’”
Some Republicans have been supportive of the USPS in the past, as well they should: In rural America, where the GOP has some of its strongest support, the USPS provides services that no private company would at such a low cost. And when you talk to actual people, you find that the Postal Service is absolutely beloved; according to the Pew Research Center, 90 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the USPS, more than for any other federal agency.
But the Trump administration has been pushing for privatization of the Postal Service for some time. Why does Trump have it in for the USPS? As far as we can tell, his determination to undermine it is driven mostly by animus for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who as the world’s richest man inspires Trump to manic heights of jealousy and insecurity. From early in his term, Trump has complained that the Postal Service doesn’t charge Amazon enough money for shipping packages (in fact, package delivery is one area where the USPS makes a profit). The pandemic offered the president his first opportunity to truly threaten the agency he calls Amazon’s “delivery boy.” Destroying the USPS would only bolster private companies that ship packages—such as Amazon—but that presumably hasn’t entered into Trump’s thinking.
There may be other reasons Trump despises the Postal Service. For years it has been a vehicle for African Americans to get a toehold in the middle class with good pay and benefits (not to mention union representation), and that may not sit well with Trump. Plus, with expectations of an enormous increase in demand for mail ballots, the Postal Service will be absolutely vital if we’re to have anything resembling a fair election in November. That’s the last thing Trump wants, and it might be playing into his calculations.
Whatever the full explanation, in this instance, the good of the entire country—liberal and conservative, blue states and red, urban and rural, all of us who get mail, in short all of us—must be sacrificed to whatever mixture of infantile jealousy and cynicism is swimming around in Donald Trump’s head.
If the USPS can survive until next year, postal reform will be one more item to add to President Joe Biden’s growing agenda, should he be fortunate enough to win. It needs an immediate infusion of cash to deal with the revenue shortfall it is now experiencing, as well as an end to the preposterous retiree prepayment requirement. We also should explore new ways to use the Postal Service and its 31,000 retail locations to serve Americans’ needs, particularly those with low incomes; postal banking is long overdue.
And while President Trump may see this as a chance to undermine the Postal Service, the rest of us should see it as an opportunity to honor the institution and the people who comprise it.
This crisis has shown us a lot about interconnection, about solidarity and common fate and the ways we rely on one another. Those ideas are built into some of our institutions, perhaps none more than the Postal Service. From its origins in the U.S. Constitution, it was intended to connect us to one another, so that we could live as one nation. That idea is even written into Title 39 of the U.S. Code:
The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.
Donald Trump may not find “binding the Nation together” and providing the same service to “all communities” a particularly important or even desirable goal, but the rest of us ought to. And we’ll have to fight to make sure that promise is kept.
