Trump wants to destroy USPS. We can’t allow him to get away with it
Donald Trump has never hidden his intention to destroy the United States Postal Service (USPS) as we know it. The administration released plans openly declaring that its long-term aim was to privatize the USPS, enriching private investors by handing them a valuable public asset. Now, Trump’s postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is under fire for internal changes that are hindering the USPS’s ability to deliver mail efficiently, and Trump himself has implied that he is reluctant to fund the USPS due to his longstanding opposition to mail-in voting.
DeJoy is a prototypical “political crony” appointee, a Republican party donor who never worked for the postal service and has financial interest in private delivery competitors to the USPS. The Intercept discovered that when DeJoy was in the private sector, he had a long history of overseeing labor violations. DeJoy has admitted that his changes to the USPS have caused delays to service, though he insists it has been unintentional. Trump has targeted the USPS for years, threatening to jack up prices and treating it as in need of an overhaul, one that DeJoy is now ruthlessly implementing.
The postal service has long been a target for Republicans, in part because a successful USPS is a threat to Republican ideology. After all, the conservative argument is that efficient public services are essentially impossible, that most government functions should be handed over to the private sector. A popular socialized mail service threatens to severely undercut this case. After all, if people are satisfied with the government delivering their mail, they might turn out to be satisfied with the government providing their health insurance. It could be a slippery slope toward socialism. A number of other countries have privatized their postal services.
Trump did not actually start the war on the USPS. Barack Obama actually pushed austerity measures, including a plan to eliminate Saturday delivery and cut the service’s budget. Obama’s former Office of Management and Budget director, Peter Orszag, endorsed full privatization. The ideology that government should be “lean” and “run like a business”, and that the private sector is inherently superior to the public sector, is a bipartisan delusion.
The postal service’s infamous financial woes are not actually hard to fix. While Trump tries to suggest it is all a result of inefficiency and mismanagement, we know that it mostly boils down to an absurdly unnecessary requirement imposed on the USPS which required it to put away billions of dollars each year for future retirement benefits. It would be easy to get the USPS shipshape again, but it would require a commitment to building an excellent public service, one that Obama didn’t really show and Trump certainly doesn’t have.
We should also remember, though, that talk of the USPS “losing money” is inherently a bit misleading and strange. Public services do not “lose money”, because they’re not designed to make money. If people said that the public library, or the school system, or the fire department was “losing money”, it would be very strange. Of course they are: they don’t take in revenue, because their purpose is to give everyone a free service, paid for out of government funds. It’s not like that money just goes into a pit or is frittered away. The money pays for a service that we then all get to enjoy. So even though we should point out that the USPS’s financial distress is in an important way politically manufactured, we should also be careful about embracing the logic that a government agency needs to “break even”. That’s not what the government is for.
The good news is: because the postal service is popular, Trump’s attacks on it have provoked public outrage. Democrats have been unusually quick to rally to the USPS’s defense, with Nancy Pelosi promising the strict oversight from the House on changes to the postal service. Protesters gathered outside the postmaster general’s house to demonstrate against changes to the service. The outpouring of attention, and the militant attitude toward defending the institution, is an encouraging sign.
The most important thing is to keep it up. Governments commit their worst crimes when people stop paying attention. Trump has made it clear that if he can get away with it, he’ll end government mail delivery altogether. So he can’t be allowed to get away with it.
A very clever Republican tactic is to mismanage the government, and then point to government mismanagement as a case for privatization. (Hence hobbling the USPS with absurd budgetary requirements and then pointing out holes in its budget.) To counter that, it’s very important to make the general public aware of whose fault the problem is. If people see their mail delayed, and become frustrated, they need to understand that it’s Trump, not their local letter carrier, who is at fault. Trump is going to try to turn the agency into the villain of the story, because the USPS’s popularity is one of the reasons it has been relatively safe. We can’t allow that to happen. We need to show appreciation for the service and demand that it be funded generously and given the resources it needs to continue its vitally important work.
Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs and a Guardian US columnist
Trump has targeted the USPS for years, threatening to jack up prices and treating it as in need of an overhaul, one that DeJoy is now ruthlessly implementing