Postal reform must begin with law change
If nothing else, the pandemic has shown the continued importance of the U.S. Postal Service as a mechanism to not only keep people connected but as a vital link in the nation’s commerce at the local, state and national level.
In 2020, the U.S. Postal Service had total mail volume of 129.2 billion pieces of mail. Postal workers sorted and delivered medications, purchases, bills, cards and letters. The Postal Service helps keep America’s economy running.
The U.S. Postal Service also is something of a political punching bag. In 2006, after concerns were raised that USPS was making “too much” money, Congress enacted reforms which were designed to set the postal service up for failure by demanding the service, which predates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, be self supporting while at the same time mandating accounting standards that would be unacceptable to any private business.
The most egregious of these is that the USPS must pre-fund post retirement healthcare for workers at the moment they are hired. According to a financial analysis by Barron’s, this burden amounts to about $11 billion in red ink added to the USPS operating budget each year. While federal law requires private pensions to be pre-funded, in the private sector post-retirement health benefits are rare for most workers and are paid as they are incurred. This burden to prefund post retirement health insurance for all its workers is unique to the USPS. No other government agencies or private sector businesses carry such a legally mandated burden.
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy recently announced service changes reducing delivery standards while calling for steep rate increases for periodicals and other categories of mail. These rate increases amount to a backdoor tax on community newspapers and other businesses who rely on the USPS to deliver their products. Industry experts with the National Newspaper Association project the rate increase could end up forcing more than 200 newspapers in the country out of business.
In addition, the new postal standards would lengthen the time it takes for all types of mail to be delivered. Consumers should expect to pay late fees as a matter of routine as the window of time between statements arriving and payments being received shrinks. Likewise, the millions of Americans who rely on medications to be delivered must hope that they can wait additional days or weeks for their refills.
It is time to end the spiral of increasing rates and decreasing service standards and restore profitability to the U.S. Postal Service by eliminating the burdens imposed by the 2006 law. It is time to enact common sense, bipartisan reform which holds the USPS to the same standard as other federal agencies and recognizes that it is indeed a necessary government service as vital to America’s well-being as the federal highway system or U.S. military.
