Save the post office
The 245-year-old U.S. Postal Service faces a $22 billion shortfall over the next 18 months.
It is America’s favorite federal agency and it is under siege.
The U.S. Postal Service is in dire financial straits, facing a $22 billion shortfall over the next 18 months caused by decreased mail volume during the coronavirus outbreak. If nothing is done, an institution that claims the original postmaster Benjamin Franklin as its patron saint may not survive past the summer.
Yes, we’ve been hearing news of its impending demise for years, but without an influx of funds, the agency may be unable to finance operations or pay its workers.
That can’t be allowed.
Every day, as thousands of letter carriers visit our homes, they speak to the essential nature of the USPS. Whether they’re delivering a desperately needed stimulus check or birthday cookies from Grandma, their presence in this time of crisis is reassuring.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” says the agency’s chiseled motto. Nor, apparently, a deadly pandemic.
Mail carriers risk exposure to the novel coronavirus on their routes. More than 1,200 postal employees have tested positive for COVID-19 and more than 30 have died. Thousands are in self-quarantine.
That sense of duty proves how seriously they take the agency’s critical mandate that every American have access to the mail — from big city apartment dwellers to rural residents.
Lawmakers should follow suit and do everything they can to protect the Postal Service.
Help from Congress has so far been anemic. The initial $2.2 trillion stimulus bill passed last month failed to address the agency’s $14 billion in outstanding debt. Instead, it allowed the USPS to borrow up to $10 billion more from the federal government — a move described as “a meaningless gesture” by Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly, Democratic chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s government operations subcommittee.
“It’s a slap in the face, and it’s not what they need,” Connolly told the Federal News Network. “They don’t need more debt capacity, they need debt forgiveness.”
Technological changes in how we communicate and competition from private companies are at the heart of the Postal Service’s long-term decline, but Congress itself is partly responsible for its financial difficulties, which existed long before the novel coronavirus.
Even as the USPS reported an $8.8 billion loss last year, postal officials have long said it could almost break even if it weren’t required by legislation — passed in 2006 — to pre-fund health care benefits for future retirees, an almost unheard of burden these days.
To survive , the Postal Service is asking lawmakers to support a $75 billion relief package.
The Trump administration is not only opposed to that request, it has actively sought to kill any help for the struggling agency. Initially, lawmakers had agreed on a $13 billion grant, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said that was a deal breaker, according to The Washington Post.
The president’s enmity towards the USPS seems to be tied to efforts to privatize the service and his disdain for Amazon owner Jeff Bezos. Trump has called the Postal Service Amazon’s “delivery boy” and falsely claimed that its parcel delivery for the company was a money-losing deal.
The nearly 245-year-old Postal Service is too important for its survival to depend on one president’s whim. Its lack of funding could even impact the 2020 elections, as more states expand absentee voting as a safety measure during the pandemic.
Lawmakers need not fulfill the agency’s dream $75 billion wish list, but the measures included in the original House-backed stimulus legislation are a good place to start: a $25 billion grant, doing away with a $3 billion borrowing limit and some debt forgiveness.
Any aid should be seen as a shortterm measure, though, not permission to continue to ignore the agency’s financial problems. Once this crisis subsides, officials need to work on the structural changes the Postal Service needs to stay healthy long after this pandemic has ended.