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. (...)
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.
[ed. When I first moved to Washington state a few years ago and got to vote by mail I wondered, why haven't we been doing this forever? It's so simple and easy. You get a ballot in the mail along with a detailed brochure providing both pro and con arguments by advocates on either sides of the issues, fill in your votes, sign it and send it off (no postage necessary), or drop off at libraries, postal and county offices, etc. Easy peasy. Sure beats standing in long lines after work. See also:
Almost every citizen is at least inconvenienced. I’ve been corresponding throughout the day with readers from around the country who have gotten mail delivery half of the days this week, who are waiting for overdue prescriptions, waiting on packages who are two weeks overdue, Social Security checks which are sole sources of income. For many life saving prescriptions are delayed or lost. Critical medical tests are being invalidated because they spend to line in the mail. Businesses already battered by COVID are imperiled because shipments are late. These all apply to citizens from the far right to the far left.
The Post Office isn’t some newfangled federal responsibility. It is one of very few federal responsibilities and agencies of government explicitly referenced in the federal constitution.
President Trump is far from the first corrupt American President. But it is genuinely hard to think of a case in almost a quarter millennium of US history in which a chief executive has inconvenienced, damaged and imperiled so many citizens so directly for the sole purpose of corruptly maintaining power in defiance of the constitutional order. There’s really nothing comparable.
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. (...)
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.
by Nathan J. Robinson, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Rob Latour/Rex/Shutterstock[ed. When I first moved to Washington state a few years ago and got to vote by mail I wondered, why haven't we been doing this forever? It's so simple and easy. You get a ballot in the mail along with a detailed brochure providing both pro and con arguments by advocates on either sides of the issues, fill in your votes, sign it and send it off (no postage necessary), or drop off at libraries, postal and county offices, etc. Easy peasy. Sure beats standing in long lines after work. See also:
Almost every citizen is at least inconvenienced. I’ve been corresponding throughout the day with readers from around the country who have gotten mail delivery half of the days this week, who are waiting for overdue prescriptions, waiting on packages who are two weeks overdue, Social Security checks which are sole sources of income. For many life saving prescriptions are delayed or lost. Critical medical tests are being invalidated because they spend to line in the mail. Businesses already battered by COVID are imperiled because shipments are late. These all apply to citizens from the far right to the far left.
The Post Office isn’t some newfangled federal responsibility. It is one of very few federal responsibilities and agencies of government explicitly referenced in the federal constitution.
President Trump is far from the first corrupt American President. But it is genuinely hard to think of a case in almost a quarter millennium of US history in which a chief executive has inconvenienced, damaged and imperiled so many citizens so directly for the sole purpose of corruptly maintaining power in defiance of the constitutional order. There’s really nothing comparable.
Make Him Own It. (Talking Points Memo).]
