The severe cuts proposed by the postmaster general — stopping Saturday mail delivery, ending door-to-door service, closing thousands of post offices — would hurt residents and businesses in Atlanta and around the country, and would destroy the U.S. Postal Service itself by driving customers away.
The good news is they aren’t necessary. That may come as a surprise, given the conventional wisdom: The postal service loses billions of dollars a year delivering the mail because everyone uses the Internet. Taxpayers are on the hook for this, and the only option is to reduce service.
That narrative is false. The postal service gets no tax money from folks in Georgia or anywhere else, and hasn’t for 30 years. It’s funded by revenue it earns selling stamps and services. And the financial crisis you hear so much about is largely an artificial crisis generated by Congress. Lawmakers mandated, starting in 2007, that the postal service do something no other public agency or private company has to do — prefund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years and do so within a decade.
That’s cost the USPS $21 billion, accounting for 84 percent of the red ink you read about. Without the pre-funding burden, the postal service would have been profitable in most recent years, despite the worst recession in 80 years, and even with Internet competition.
This is a mess Congress created and should fix immediately. A House bill to do just that is co-sponsored by 227 of 435 House members from both parties, but is being blocked from a vote by a few ideologues fiercely opposed to government, public employees or public service.
Beyond causing red ink, pre-funding has distracted postal management from developing a positive business plan for the future because the agency is focused year after year on coming up with the $5.5 billion pre-funding payment. So, rather than a plan, the postmaster general offers counter-productive reductions in service to residents and businesses — which would discourage customer use and worsen postal finances.
We’re all for efficiencies — worker productivity has doubled in recent years — but they need to be part of a thoughtful strategy, not part of dismantling the postal service.
If Congress steps up to the plate and addresses the prefunding fiasco, the postal service can focus on what it’s always done — adapting to society’s evolving needs. And that’s not wishful thinking. The Internet offers opportunities. For example, although more people pay bills online, more also order online. Those goods must be delivered, and doing so already is a growing profit-maker for the postal service.
A strong postal service remains in the national interest. How so? Because it offers the most affordable service of any industrial country, six days a week — benefiting small businesses, which produce two-thirds of all new jobs. The postal service is the cornerstone of a $1.3 trillion mailing industry that provides 7.5 million private-sector jobs. The letter carriers — named six consecutive years by Americans as the most trusted federal employees — link this vast country from Atlanta to Anchorage while binding individual communities together.
All this doesn’t cost taxpayers one dime. Does anyone still think it’s a good idea to dismantle the U.S. Postal Service?
Fredric Rolando is president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
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