Mail crisis hitting rural America hard
Montana Sen. Tester on delays: ‘It’s worse than it’s ever been’
Rhiannon Hampson thought she would hear a cacophony of cheeping when she went to her post office in coastal Maine to fetch a delivery of newly hatched chicks.
But the cardboard boxes addressed to her poultry farm were silent.
“We could hear a few, very faint peeps,” Hampson said. “Out of 500, there were maybe 25 alive. They were staggering. It was terrible.”
This is what happens when the mail becomes unreliable in rural towns and stretches of countryside where there are scant FedEx or UPS deliveries, and where people rely on the post office as an irreplaceable hub of commerce and connection.
With delays raising fears that the U.S. Postal Service is being hobbled by a combination of financial problems, politicization and pandemic, farmers and other rural residents say they are particularly vulnerable to the crisis roiling the postal system. And while President Donald Trump’s own words have raised alarms that the problems are part of an effort to keep Democrats from voting by mail, many of those being hurt the most live in rural areas that overwhelmingly support the president.
“This is an attack on a tried-and-true service that rural America depends on,” said Chris Gibbs, a farmer in western Ohio who voted for Trump in 2016, but this year started an advocacy group arguing that the president has failed rural America. “It pulls one more piece of stability, predictability and reliability from rural America. People don’t like that.”
Across the country, rural residents have been affected in several ways.
Checks and plant shipments are delayed, and tracking them down can take hours in rural towns without quick, reliable internet service. Replacement parts for farm machines are late in coming. Prescription refills are taking a week or more to reach mailboxes, a particular threat because rural communities are older than most of America.
On Native American reservations, among the country’s most remote places, families are driving five hours to get medicine and worry about being disenfranchised in November.
Then there are the chicks.
For decades, postal carriers have delivered dayold chicks, ducklings and all manner of plants and animals to small farmers and families with backyard henhouses. Industrial-scale farms have enough money to truck around their own animals or operate sprawling hatcheries. For everyone else, the mail is how the chickens come home to roost.
Some chicks are getting lost in postal warehouses or spending days on trucks, farmers said. Others are getting smothered or crushed in the deluge of boxes created by America’s coronavirus-induced online ordering. One hatchery in Pennsylvania lost 3,000 chicks in a recent shipment.
“We just don’t have any other options,” Hampson said. “There’s nothing sadder than seeing a box of tiny little fuzzy peeps and all of them are DOA.”
Farmers said they were so afraid of losing more chicks in transit that they were driving hundreds of miles to pick up shipments from hatcheries.
This year, elected officials and postal workers said the USPS suffered a double blow.
First came the coronavirus, which sickened workers and flooded the system with a tsunami of package orders. Then came cost-cutting measures ordered by Louis DeJoy, the new postmaster general.
Testifying before a Senate committee Friday — and facing calls for his resignation — DeJoy said he would delay overtime cuts and other operational changes until after the election. He said that he was “extremely highly confident” that even mail-in ballots sent close to Election Day would be delivered on time.
David Partenheimer, a Postal Service spokesman, said the agency had “experienced some temporary service disruptions in a few locations” because of the pandemic, but said “things are slowly getting back to normal.” Union members, however, said that sorting facilities were still overflowing and that the situation was chaotic.
A recent survey of voters in three rural, Republican districts in Pennsylvania found that in this polarized election season, some voters’ views of the post office were splitting along party lines.
The survey by the Niskanen Center, a moderate think tank, found Republicans were far less concerned than Democrats about the current turmoil, and said they were also less likely to vote by mail. Twice as many Democrats said they were “very dependent” on the post office.
But the same survey found some risk in attacking what has been among the best-loved government agencies. Rural Democrats and Republicans in the survey were leery of privatizing the Postal Service, an aim of Trump’s conservative allies, or cutting its budget. Trump opposes a Democratic effort to provide the post office with $25 billion in emergency aid.
Amid the uproar, some rural residents worried that the damage to their livelihoods and the credibility of the USPS had already been done. They wondered whether they could still trust the mail to handle their packages, animals and ballots.
Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat in rural Montana, has received thousands of calls about the Postal Service since the pandemic began. One of the complaints was from a neighbor in the roughly 600-person town of Big Sandy who ran out of medication while waiting for a refill to come in the mail.
“It’s worse than it’s ever been,” Tester said. “It’s hurting rural America.”
Tester’s Republican counterpart in Montana, Sen. Steve Daines, also objected to the postmaster’s new policies but did not respond to an interview request.
Rural residents know that sparsely populated back country routes and tiny post offices are not moneymakers for an agency losing tens of billions of dollars because of congressionally mandated health care payments and declines in mail volume.
But in places already isolated because of spotty internet access, people said the post office was the only institution mandated to serve them at a flat cost, no matter the weather or how remote they were.
“If these small rural towns lose their post offices they lose their identity,” said Gaylene Christensen, who relies on the post office to ship orders of home decor from her shop in Arlington, South Dakota. “We’re the ones who are going to get hit.”