Postal Service crisis is about more than just mail-in voting

Never in recent history has the U.S. Postal Service been the center of such national attention.

Stories about Senate and House committee hearings, a weekend session of the House of Representatives, continuing conflict over the prior removal from service of mail sorting machines (which enhance, not reduce, efficiency) and neighborhood postal boxes, as well as reduced hours of operation and the president’s comments and tweets about denying new funding as a means of limiting voting by mail fill the airwaves and the pages of newspapers.

However, all of this misses a potentially far more significant longer-term issue.

The President and his allies — especially the White House Chief of Staff, the Secretary of the Treasury and the newly appointed Postmaster General, Trump megadonor, Louis DeJoy — have justified their actions on two grounds. First, they are making the Postal Service more managerially and financially efficient. Second, they are concerned that more mail-in voting leads to vast ballot fraud. The former point is not only misleading, but also a disingenuous deflection of a far more serious issue. The latter point is simply inaccurate.

Regarding the latter, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, drawing upon election-fraud data compiled by the conservative, mostly very Trump friendly, Heritage Foundation, recently completed a comprehensive review of voting in America, which includes the 250 million mail-in votes cast in the

U.S. since 2000. During these last two decades there have been 143 convictions for vote by mail election fraud which makes the likelihood of an individual being struck by lightning somewhat greater than their being the victim of electoral fraud via mail-in voting.

It is not surprising that, in the face of a raging pandemic, the voting-by-mail issue would capture attention. However, over the long term, it may well be that managerial issues, or at least their weaponization, have the greatest long-term national consequence. The reality is that the Postal Service is a very large, complex organization. It employs more workers than Microsoft, General Motors and Ford Motor Company combined and is one of the very few public services which the U.S. Constitution calls upon the Congress to establish.

To have it victimized by blatant and intentional managerial malpractice is a matter of concern that goes well beyond the November election. Even in the best of light, it is very hard to characterize the new Postmaster General’s recent unilateral, manipulative and arbitrary administrative actions as anything less than administrative malpractice. Unless the goal is to create instability and undermine effectiveness, no responsible leader, upon walking into a new organization, would, as DeJoy did, seek to significantly restructure complex nationwide, but often locally distinct, procedures and simultaneously purge the top two dozen managers before gaining a serious understanding of a unique organizational culture.

To do so is more than irresponsible public administration. It represents the hostile weaponizing, and systematic undermining, of effective public management through the introduction of intentionally negative administration. It intentionally sacrifices quality service delivery for the purpose of achieving partisan political ends. Such actions not only undermine the Postal Service but, even more significantly, the nation’s belief in the capacity of government to solve important public problems and deliver needed services.

It is not uncommon for big donors, especially like the current Postmaster General, who has contributed millions to Republican groups, to receive high-profile political appointments. Nor is it totally unknown for those receiving such appointments to have obvious conflicts of interest. However, to have a new Postmaster General who has, as recently revealed, $25 to 70 million dollars of stock in a company with which the Postal Service both competes and also sometimes contracts with for managerial services represents, even by the standards of an administration that seems characterized by conflict of interest, a truly stunning situation.