Blink & You Lose It: The Ongoing War Against the Postal Service

Ultimately this is more important than Luigi Mangione, who I will get to in time...

Hey there, thanks for holding on while I was away. You all might be expecting something on Luigi Mangione but that can wait. Any words I contribute to the current cacophony are only going to be lost in that cacophony. And there is so much more to know that whatever is written now could easily be based on bullshit. So better to wait, something I advise you to do as well.

Today, I’m going to write about the United States Postal Service and the immediate and ongoing threat to its existence as a government service. I’ve not only been lifelong USPS user; my livelihood is dependent on it and has been for decades. So, it’s not a shocker that I pay close attention to what’s going on with the post office, especially when Republicans are in charge and talk about “running government as a business” ramps up.

This morning the New York Times ran an article titled, “Trump eyes privatizing U.S. Postal Service, citing financial losses.” The headline is a bit misleading, as it implies that privatizing USPS is a new Trump obsession. It is not. During his first term, Trump was intent on turning the post office over to big business and had Louis DeJoy installed as Postmaster General.

DeJoy, the owner of a private shipping and logistics company, the kind of which would benefit from USPS privatization, quickly set about sabotaging the postal service – cutting services, raising prices, busting the union, all in an attempt to turn the public against the second most popular government agency (after the National Park Service). DeJoy’s rampage is both opportunistic and somewhat inevitable. Trump’s obsession with selling off/out USPS is not unique nor new. It is a conservative obsession and has been for over fifty years. Republicans have been waiting for a clean shot at USPS for decades. With Trump they got their opportunity, and that is especially true come January 2025.

Let’s be perfectly clear about one thing: The United States Postal Service is not a business, it has never been a business, and it was never intended to be a business or run as one. As it’s title states, USPS is a service, much like the National Weather Service, which is not expected to “turn a profit.” It is an important part of our nation’s infrastructure, much like the Federal Highway System, which is not expected to “turn a profit.” But it’s more than that. It’s our right.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution states, “[The Congress shall have Power] … To establish Post Offices and post Roads...” While some of the Framers were highly critical of a federal postal service (primarily Thomas Jefferson and John Jay), others (including James Madison and our first postmaster Benjamin Franklin) were insistent on it. Postal service supporters won that fight and got the right to a post office enshrined in the Constitution.

Franklin, Madison, et al didn’t come up with the idea of a national postal service. The Brits had already established one in the Colonies and it had proved to be very useful. Some history:

The British imported their postal system to Colonial America in 1692, when they appointed a postmaster for the colonies. It was a division of the postal system for the entire British Empire, including Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the British established "post roads." However, the term “post roads” had less to do with actual mail than it did with the posts found along these designated roads.

Posts were different from post offices. During the 18th century, posts were stations where postal workers collected and delivered mail. They also exchanged tired horses and collected tolls. By contrast, post offices or postal facilities often included inns, leased horses, and published newspapers. In fact, Benjamin Franklin, young America's first Postmaster General, built his fortune as a publisher through his pre-Revolution appointment as Philadelphia's postmaster.

Franklin contributed to the creation of the USPS by serving on a Second Continental Congress committee dedicated to forming an independent national postal system. He was then appointed as the United States Postmaster General by Congress on July 26, 1775. Although the Articles of Confederation included a clause for establishing a federal post office, it took the founding fathers several years to implement it.

Neither Great Brittan nor the new United States looked at posts or post offices as a “profit center,” let alone “a business” or a “capitalist enterprise.” They saw the postal service as “providing the means of intercourse between the citizens of remote parts of the confederation, on such a regular footing, as must contribute greatly to the convenience of commerce, and to the free, and frequent communication of facts, and sentiments between individuals”…

Or, to put it in plain English, a national postal service enables us to communicate and do business with each, both of which aids citizens, enhances life, and strengthens the country. The service itself is the benefit, or, in capitalist terms, “the profit.” Hell, the postal service not only enables many of us to “turn a profit” and make a living, it is the backbone of a trillion-dollar e-commerce/mail order system. That last sentence begs the question: If so, many people are making money from USPS, shouldn’t USPS be able to make money? The answer is, yes, and it does, and for years it was able to at least breakeven.

In 1970, Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970. The PRA made the Post Office its own agency, enabling it to set rates and wages, as well as negotiate with unions. It also was tasked with being “self-sustaining” …and it was, but something happened.

Early in President George W. Bush’s second term, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) of 2006. The PAEA eliminated postal rate caps, mandating that USPS price its services so it would be “competitive” with UPS, Fed Ex, and other private carriers – a harm to consumers and a gift to Big Business. Worse for USPS, was “the mandate”:

Prior to 2006, the Postal Service handled its retiree health expenses on a Pay-As-You-Go basis, meaning retiree health care premiums were paid as they were incurred – just as most companies did and do, and just as all other agencies (including Congress) did and still do. As Congress considered postal reform legislation in 2006, the Bush administration insisted on the insertion of language requiring the Postal Service to begin prefunding such premiums – funding retiree health the way pensions are funded. The language set up a 10-year schedule of payments (starting at $5.4 billion in 2006 and rising to $5.8 billion in 2016) and required the Postal Service to make actuarially determined payments (normal cost and amortization payments) beginning in 2017.

Initially, the Postal Service was able to make the payments, building a nest egg of more than $50 billion in its Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund (PSRHBF). But with the recession and the overly stringent price cap put into place by the PAEA, the USPS soon found that it could no longer afford to make the prefunding payments, despite exhausting its credit limit of $15 billion. It has not made a prefunding payment since 2012, though the $38 billion in missed payments are carried as a liability on the Postal Service’s balance sheet.

The Postal Service undertook a massive downsizing of its networks, slashing over 200,000 jobs, closing and consolidating hundreds of mail processing plants and facilities, and rolling bac service standards. But it has been clear for years that Congress must act to reconsider the disastrous prefunding policy. For more than 10 years, Congress and postal stakeholders have struggled to reach consensus on postal reform legislation. Although both business and labor stakeholders have come together in a coalition for reform, Congress has failed to act. The section below summarizes the tangled history of these postal reform efforts.

So, not only was USPS never intended to be a business, when it proved successful as a business, Republicans sabotaged the postal service by making it raise rates, cut services, and cover retirement expenses in a way that no other federal agency has to. Clearly, the “USPS crisis” is not only a set-up, it is one that can be solved by removing the retirement mandate. Instead, conservatives insist on privatization.

At the same time, we are now being asked to subsidize the creation of a new nuclear power infrastructure, solely for the benefit of Big Tech and the massive amount of electricity needed to fuel the “AI Boom,” something very few of us will benefit from in any way and which is right now far from sustainable. While Big Tech is making a lot of noise about teaming up with and investing in nuke plants, even if Tech shelled out 100% for every new nuke project, we’d still be on the hook for trillions in increased electricity costs, infrastructure improvements, regulation, etc. Already, AI’s pressure on the power grid is causing a crisis and money from ratepayers to upgrade the grid to meet AI’s demand.

It's not like this is without precedent. One of the biggest advocates of USPS privatization is “the world’s richest man” Elon Musk. Musk is a screamer when it comes to “running government like a business,” which in Musk’s case means losing billions of dollars (X/Twitter), relying on tax breaks and no competition to turn a profit (Tesla), and being mostly subsidized by the government in order to exist (SpaceX).

If we are obliged to fund the “AI Boom” and make Musk filthy rich, why can’t we have a healthy, affordable public postal service, as guaranteed to us in the United States Constitution? Why are we subject to the worst of capitalism, while the wealthy benefit from socialism at our expense? And why is the ruling class wondering why people are so pissed off at them that they are forming Luigi Mangione fan clubs?