OPINION:
The U.S. Postal Service has been in the news a lot lately. That’s good because, to be frank, we don’t think about it enough. We take for granted that the mail will be there Monday through Saturday, rain or shine, because that’s the way it’s always been.
We need to worry about those days coming to an end. The forecast is cloudy. Despite many promises and the best intentions of its leaders, the Postal Service continues to lose money while the quality of service declines considerably.
We had high hopes. In 2020, the Postal Service announced an ambitious multipart “Delivering for America” plan to restore its financial viability and improve service. The plan was to cut costs, increase postage rates and get Congress to relieve the Postal Service of some unfair retiree health care obligations. With all that, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy predicted the USPS would break even as early as fiscal 2023.
Congress did its part. It passed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, and President Biden signed it. Mailers have done their part by paying higher postage rates — they’re up 39% over the last four years, even higher than the inflation rate.
The problem is that the Postal Service has not kept its part of the bargain. It hasn’t done much to reduce costs besides an effort to move long-distance transportation of mail and packages from planes to trucks — which increased delivery times.
Cheaper but less efficient isn’t progress. Neither is the inexplicable decision to convert 190,000 part-time, flexible employees to full-time career status while doubling their compensation. Labor costs are already 75% of the total Postal Service burden. This means that the Postal Service is fully staffed for its peak holiday season — which we all appreciate — but has excess labor the other 11 months of the year.
The Postal Service has also been insourcing transportation, terminating private sector contracts and training postal workers to become truck drivers less efficiently and at greater cost. It has spent over $15 billion on the construction and deployment of new processing plants largely duplicative of private sector ones.
Is it any surprise that the financial results have been dismal? The USPS lost $6.5 billion in fiscal 2023 and is projected to lose over $8 billion in fiscal 2024 (the final numbers are expected sometime in November).
You might think that service would improve, at least for all the money that’s been spent. That hasn’t happened either. The Postal Service has failed to meet any of its mail service standards. And service declined precipitously wherever it has rolled out a new processing center (Atlanta, Houston, Richmond, Virginia). The latest proposal is to go to post offices more than 50 miles away from a big processing center only once a day in the morning instead of the current twice-day, morning and afternoon. This will inconvenience everyone, especially those in rural areas.
The Postal Service has wandered down a path leading to higher costs, slower service and an increase in size rather than efficiency. That’s unfortunate. It threatens the Postal Service’s ability to do what Congress had mandated it to do: Deliver mail and packages to everyone in America six days a week.
A strategy of working with and better integrating private sector processing and transportation companies into its operations and focusing on its unique, core governmental function of final mile delivery would have been and remains the better option, especially since no private company will take on universal delivery to every home and business in the Lower 48.
The Postal Service has instead doubled down, releasing version 2.0 of Delivering for America this past September, which brags about more employees and billion-dollar expenditures while repeating empty promises of cost savings, greater efficiency and better service. The Postal Service insists its plan is the only plan.
Unless the Postal Service changes direction, it is likely to jeopardize the ability of all Americans, no matter where they live, to have affordable access to reliable mail and package delivery services.
It’s time to return the Delivering for America plan to sender. We know the address.
• An experienced journalist and commentator and highly regarded political analyst, Peter Roff is a former United Press International and U.S. News & World Report columnist who is now affiliated with several public policy organizations. You can reach him at RoffColumns@gmail.com and follow him on social media @TheRoffDraft.
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