Unsanitized: Political Tide Begins to Turn in Postal Service Crisis

Plus, the history of an agency attacked from the outside, and now the inside. This is The COVID-19 Daily Report for August 17, 2020.

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First Response

Here’s where we’re at after an eventful couple days in the Postal Service crisis:

• Those letters sent to two states I mentioned on Friday, warning that voters may not get ballots in time, actually went out to 46 states. They’re kind of cover-your-ass documents, so the USPS can say they at least informed states of potential problems and threw the burden back on them.

• Congressman Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) made a criminal referral to the New Jersey Attorney General over deliberate mail slowdown, a criminal offense.

• The USPS inspector general is investigating.

• Protesters showed up in front of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s house on Saturday and made a ton of noise.

• The House Oversight Committee has called DeJoy to testify on August 24 and wants to know by today whether he’s coming. Presumably they’ll issue a subpoena if he doesn’t comply. Mike Duncan, chair of the Postal Service Board of Governors (DeJoy’s bosses, essentially), has also been called.

• In a ten-page letter, Democrats are seeking key documents from DeJoy, due on Friday.

• Speaker Pelosi is hauling back the House into session to vote on legislation that would prohibit the Postal Service from implementing operational changes, and revert it back to the operations system in place on January 1, 2020.

• There’s a “Day of Action” tomorrow, where House members will hold events in front of post offices in their districts. 

Read all of our Unsanitized reports

This coordinated response has put the Postal Service and the White House on the defensive. A USPS spokesman said the agency would stop taking post office boxes off the streets, first in Western states and then nationwide. (Annual reviews of boxes routinely identify whether they get enough mail to justify a postal worker going by it on their route, but given the circumstances the paranoia is justified.) White House chief of staff Mark Meadows claimed that no more sorting machines will be taken offline, though documents obtained by Vice and CNN indicated that this was well underway and workers have seen them taken out.

I see no reason to believe these assurances from Meadows and USPS. But the trajectory is notable, with the USPS rhetorically backing down and Democrats taking action. This has become the biggest political story in America, and with the Postal Service generally beloved, from that standpoint I’d rather be in the shoes of those defending it rather than destroying it.

But politics, and even elections, are not the biggest near-term consequence of the destruction of the mail. People get paychecks through the mail. They get 1.2 billion prescriptions per year that way, including all VA prescriptions. They get billions of critical packages, necessary for the smooth functioning of commerce and small business. I may have mentioned once or twice that we’re in a pandemic, making USPS services even more vital. When I said Friday that 182 million pieces of mail go out per day, I was only counting first-class pieces. Overall it’s around 472 million, every day. You can’t just snarl that and expect no real-world impact, up to and literally including life and death.

A ridiculous and useless argument sparked on Twitter over the weekend about whether Bernie Sanders, somehow, is to blame for Trump’s commandeering of the Postal Service, through blocking appointments to the Board of Governors. This showed a lack of understanding of how the Board of Governors operates. I wrote this back in 2014 about the Board of Governors, a nine-member panel whose terms expire on a staggered basis. Even if President Obama got a full complement onto the board (and he didn’t, not because of Bernie Sanders holds, but because he didn’t fill the vacancies for many years to begin with, and didn’t prioritize the board when Democrats held the Senate), Trump would have been able to secure a majority by filling expiring seats. I can’t think of a less productive thing to talk about so I’ll end that now.

The USPS has been in trouble for a while, though mostly because of outside pressures. In 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) forced the agency into a rushed 10-year window to pre-fund pension and retiree health benefits. The rise of email has dropped mail volume, though packages have picked up the slack somewhat. PAEA also restricted new business lines for revenue, a debilitating circumstance for any business, unable to adapt to changes in customer behavior. In the Obama years, a rotten partnership with Staples had non-union workers doing union postal workers’ jobs.

Very little of these problems had anything to do with the Postal Service’s actual operations, which are largely in line with historical practice on covering expenses, and would be ahead of that absent the pre-funding situation. They are all outside-directed, from privatizers and enemies meaning to destroy the agency. Typically they haven’t come from inside the agency itself, with the ulterior motive of disrupting an election.

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

144.

Housekeeping Note

Starting tomorrow, Unsanitized will be pre-empted for Unconventional, coverage of the Democratic and Republican virtual gatherings written by our editor at large Harold Meyerson. So Tuesday through Friday this week and the week after is reserved for that. Enjoy the virtual spectacle.

Today I Learned

  • Here’s video of the Netroots Nation panel I moderated last Friday on the post-pandemic economy with Rep. Ro Khanna, Zephyr Teachout, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Joe Sanberg, and CA State Sen. Holly Mitchell. (YouTube)
  • The NBA bubble may have led to a critical breakthrough on cheap saliva-based coronavirus tests. Let the NBA run everything! (ESPN)
  • Immunity from COVID-19 after infections isn’t 100 percent guaranteed, but it’s looking more and more real. (New York Times)
  • South Dakota becomes the first state to entirely opt out of the Trump administration’s executive order boosting unemployment. (Washington Post)
  • A teacher sick-out in Arizona stops classes, and it could be the first of many. (The Guardian)
  • Big testing and tracing program set for L.A. public schools. (Los Angeles Times)
  • What a good time to cut military health care, during a pandemic. (Politico)
  • The move to remote work could finally ease rents in the most in-demand areas like San Francisco. (Wall Street Journal)

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