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I guess what confuses me is that, even assuming good intentions by the new Postmaster General, why and why now?
I believe the main stated reason has been that the USPS loses money and they want to make it break even or profitable. Assuming that's the reason (and not election interference), why should such an infrastructure be breakeven or profitable? And why now, during a pandemic?
There are plenty of government services that aren't even close to breakeven. I imagine USPS actually might be one of the most self-sustaining federal departments. Why should this particular one be profitable? Why should this one be privatized, out of all of them?
The USPS has been one of the most stable, reliable, and predictable forces in my life. Their informal creed speaks volumes to me: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
I'm open to hearing arguments for why the USPS should be profitable (or privatized) and why now is a good time. I'm finding a very hard time imagining why.
The theme of the last four years of Federal government has been dismantling working-but-flawed systems in favor of private enterprise. You cannot assume "good intentions" on the part of a Postmaster General who is part of this government and is personally invested in private competitors to the USPS.
The USPS also labors under the Republican-inflicted 2006 decree to prefund their pension obligations: https://www.gao.gov/assets/660/650511.pdf
The GOP is clearly intent on tearing down USPS but I've never actually understood the rationale for it - USPS has traditionally been self-funded and (without unreasonable financial burdens involving pre-paying pensions) would continue to be a revenue source rather than sink today. Mail is also a bit of an assumed service in the US so I don't know why there is a lack of understanding that privatization would lead to a lack in service quality in rural areas (where the GOP shows the strongest).
I do understand it's part of the whole "government small enough you can drown it in a bathtub" philosophy but it seems like a really silly service to go after. It provides clear societal benefits - has an insanely high quality of service (just look at CanadaPost and offerings in Europe) extremely low cost for use and is integral to a lot of social services (taxes, voting, census etc...) there are much bigger government boogie men to go after than USPS.
The existence of a well-run government agency goes against free-marketeer beliefs that the government can never do anything right. The USPS flies in the face of that.
Unionized government employees also typically lean Democratic, too.
Not sure if this the actual rationale, but a potential explanation: https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/19/politics/osc-usps-hillary-cli...
A government investigation concluded that the United States Postal Service "improperly coordinated" with a postal workers union that supported Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Yeah I don't get it. They're complaining about a 2.2bn dollar loss this year, when last year the loss was even greater - and that's with the apparently reduction in mailings this quarter. At the same time the Gov will spend billions on a fighter jet that will likely never see combat, billions on other countless military waste, who knows how much in carting the president around to golf...
I don't think this is entirely about election fraud, it just happens to be an easy target for the people that have already been trying to gut the USPS.
I see it in the same vein as them trying to gut NASA. They both have such small budgets in the grand scheme that it just makes absolutely no sense.
It is never about the actual money spent . It is about how much visibility that spend is having in the public/political mind space .
This is why doesn’t make sense to compare nasa and military budgets . Decision makers do not see all money as equal.
Even if there was no hidden agenda,cutting some spends are far easier than others even if it made logical sense , the lobbying power of the military budgets has is lot more than that of say NASA or USPS.
It is not just government it is true for corporates and non profits as well , Mozilla cuts servo over say pocket for similar reasons ,
Giving the absolute benefit of doubt to the administration , the only valid reason for why now is that term of the current administration is ending, if they don’t do it now , they may never get a chance to do it at all.
Talking about the recent postal service changes while avoiding the political implications is intellectually dishonest, even if the intentions are good. Some topics simply cannot be discussed while adhering to the Hacker News guidelines.
Oh, my intent wasn't to avoid political implications (but maybe that wasn't meant for me, at some point in HN comments I get lost), but rather to try to dig deeper into them.
In looking at the HN guidelines, I think the closest point related to this would be:
>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
I hope HN can be a place where we discuss political and ideological perspectives without engaging in battle, and leveraging curiosity to bring us closer together.
I think the challenge is that most of the examples of political conversation we see is more political debate and less political dialogue—competition vs cooperation.
So far, I've been learning in this comments section and am grateful for those who are contributing :-)
> I guess what confuses me is that, even assuming good intentions by the new Postmaster General, why and why now?
Because Congress hasn’t approved postage increases, so the post office doesn’t have the money it would take to provide the service Congress wants it to. At the same time, Congress hasn’t approved closing offices, so the post office can’t scale back to provide the service it can actually afford.
> I believe the main stated reason has been that the USPS loses money and they want to make it break even or profitable. Assuming that's the reason (and not election interference), why should such an infrastructure be breakeven or profitable?
It’s not the postmaster general’s decision. Congress set up the requirement that the post office be self funded when it limited how much it will subsidize the post office.
I can imagine a world where the post office is self funded, and I can imagine a world where the post office is heavily subsidized. I don’t think the world we live in — where the post office has to be self funded while literally requiring an act of Congress to raise prices or close offices — can actually work.
Fair points, I'm operating mostly blind on this so I'm grateful for you and others who are bringing more references to laws and the functions of it.
The question still gets me is "why now?" Why privatize or change the USPS now, when it could very well jeopardize, or at the minimum, give people the impression that it will jeopardize the election?
In other words, is the <$10B in annual loss more important than the integrity of the election?
The "why" and "why now" is that the USPS's debt has been growing and isn't sustainable in the long run. Unless structural changes are made, tax payers will ultimately be left paying the bills. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/15/postal-se...
From what I remember in this video, it's actually been a independent company spinoff since the 1970s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyU1WCQQ8A
And stopped using tax dollars in the mid 80s
Imagine if the military had to be profitable?
Imagine if they had to pre pay pensions and the VA - they'd be insanely underwater.
Indirectly it is.
Depending on how you measure externalities, it probably is
> why and why now
Playing the devils advocate, it could be a bone to throw to the small government crowd and the "why now" is because it's the middle of an election and they want to drum up support for their campaign.
However, I typically receive five or six packages per week. Two weeks ago I suddenly started having delays and some packages are taking a week longer to show up than I am used to. It was like a switch being flipped. Nothing like this happened even at the height of the lockdown. I also sent in a ballot application which is now a week late compared to when I sent it in last year. That's really concerning with how many people will be voting by mail.
I'm really scared for what is going to happen in November. Even if he loses by huge margins, Trump has set himself up to scream "rigged election" and have at least part of his base believe him. I'm not sure I can do anything other than wait around and worry, but if he loses there really will be a chunk of Americans that have convinced themselves that the new president wasn't elected democratically. That's really messed up and I don't think we've had an administration that has so undermined trust in our democratic process like that. Even when they were on the losing side, all significant politicians in my recent memory have at least shown respect for the process.
> It was like a switch being flipped. Nothing like this happened even at the height of the lockdown. I also sent in a ballot application which is now a week late compared to when I sent it in last year.
Wow. Imagine the service not hiccuping much at all during the initial lockdown and confusion around the country at the start of the pandemic and now all of a sudden losing service.
I guess I'm trying to get at that bone and small gov't crowd and ask if this is really the fight to fight right now, if decreasing the size of the USPS is the most urgent fight that we should have as Americans. Because I do believe there are many people who want it to be private, but I want people who are supporting it to say why they believe it's urgent that this specific thing happens now, amidst all other challenges we currently face.
> why and why now?
If voting by mail enfranchises those who can't get to the polls easily on election day, does it not make sense (to those who are not favorable to that electorate) to break down the system that enables that?
Edit: Assuming positive intent (which should be done!) only works for so long.
I mean, that's my default assumption: that this is a strategy to suppress votes.
But I want to pull back and try not to assume ill intent, because I've seen how it just squashes conversation and dialogue. I want to learn what else is going on, if there is something else there.
edit: removed "don't"
Confirmed this is the case by NPR.
> While President Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, falsely claiming it leads to rampant fraud, he appeared to confirm Thursday morning that he opposes Democrats' proposed boost in funding for the U.S. Postal Service because he wants to make it harder to expand voting by mail.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/13/902109991/trump-admits-to-opp...
Many jurisdictions require postal ballots to be received by election day. Delaying mail delivery absolutely will disenfranchise many voters.
Primary argument is that most of the entire rest of the world has moved to profitable, privatized mail carrying.
I find it hard to believe that most of the rest of the world has, but it seems some countries have. Many countries don't really have functioning mail delivery, whether public or private.
The CATO Institute says "The U.S. ranks near the bottom of the Consumer Postal Council’s 26‐ country 'Index of Postal Freedom.'"[1], but they only looked at 26 countries, and even then, I'm not sure what that index looks at. I found a report from 2012 but it's long and I'm not gonna dig into it now.
Do you have examples of which countries have and what led to the change?
[1]: https://www.cato.org/publications/tax-budget-bulletin/privat...
The USPS would be profitable if it didn't have to pre-fund its pension obligations by an 75 years - an obligation no other government regulated entity must abide by.
The USPS doesn't depend on any government funding. Nearly all of its revenue comes from postage. Why is it so important for it to be private if it's not costing taxpayer money?
The reason to make changes now would be so that they're set in stone before the next administration comes into power and tries to change everything back. This logic applies to every agency, and is one of the reasons NASA's Ares system got cancelled so quickly by the Obama administration (before they had an alternative vision for space exploration).
The reason to privatize this one is because it has direct competitors, and does not accomplish anything which requires the powers of the federal government. Other departments such as the Department of Energy are not interchangeable with a private competitor, and perform functions which require direct federal involvement (guarding nuclear weapons and working with the armed services).
Some people (including myself) believe the federal government should be as small as possible, and the USPS is simply one of the easiest parts to spin-off/get rid of.
My spouse’s small business is seeing delays in deliveries the last few weeks it didn’t even see at the height of the pandemic.
And she had something get lost a week ago, something that hadn’t happened in over a year (small sample size though).
We do know that the local USPS has cut back on the hours their employees are working, which is strange considering USPS is busier than ever.
In the last two weeks, key financial docs got sent back as wrong address. Charles Schwab and our bank - we only know because they called to ask us about it. We’ve been at the same address for over 10 years. Never had this issue before. Anecdotal, perhaps, but odd timing nonetheless.
I spent ~$50k/year on USPS deliveries and also have had almost zero problems prior to the past 4 weeks. Now, we've got almost a dozen lost and delayed packages
According to their last quarterly only parcel volume is up, the rest is down - so it kinda evens out. There was a few weeks at the start when everyone was panic buying every puzzle they could on ebay that the post office felt like the week before Christmas though.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/0807-...
Funny little tidbit: my 1940s townhouse neighborhood has no universal front desk and hands out building keys to USPS for each townhouse. The mailbox is inside, and USPS is legally obligated to access it, so I know if USPS ships a package for me it's next to my apartment door.
UPS and FedEx do not have access. You have to be there when they drop off the package, or they're tossed into this hole (like a literal hole) next to the door, or they do the "we missed you" thing and sticky a note to the outer door and you pick it up in person.
I live a ten-minute drive away from the Pentagon. It's not just remote villages in Alaska that'd be inconvenienced by USPS going away.
I live in Oregon, where vote by mail is the standard. While I can drop off my ballot at a drop box (convenient for folks in town, like me) it’s delivered by USPS. This feels like a not-very-subtle attack on my voting franchise.
I’m a strong advocate for vote by mail, and it never occurred to me that the USPS would not be there to handle ballot delivery and pickup.
I wonder if there are constitutional issues with this kind of change?
IIRC, Oregon requires postal ballots to be received by election day.
Also IIRC, Washington's (State) rule is received by certification, which is 21 (?) days after election day.
Changing to the Oregon rule is floated most every legislative session. We've successfully beaten it back. But one thing I learned as an election integrity activist is the Powers That Be will keep trying until they succeed.
FURTHER:
Back in the day, the Undeliverable As Addressed (UAA) rate was %1 for First Class mail. Meaning %1 of postal ballots were not received by voters. And %1 of cast postal ballots never got back to central count. In my county, that's over 10,000 ballots lost in a general election.
Anybody worried about USPS's performance should probably be doing their own measuring of UAA and other metrics.
Any way. I'm VERY CONCERNED about the USPS monkeying with stuff that ain't broke. Ensuring postal balloting works as expected takes A LOT of effort.
I don't know why anybody has to keep entertaining the absurd notion that slowing delivery and making the service "not work" is not precisely the purpose of the changes.
Spare me the puerile libertarian arguments for a privatized postal service. There is no good reason for it to be privatized and many Americans lives will be negatively affected by such a change.
1) There are already private mail carriers (FedEx, UPS, et al.). They do not have an obligation to deliver mail in a timely manner anywhere in the continental US and overseas territories. This is fine if you are a city dweller, but private mail carriers notoriously do not guarantee "last mile" delivery. This will cut off many isolated rural communities for whom the USPS is a lifeline to the outside world.
2) USPS receives no tax dollars for their services. They are completely self-sustaining. A Republican congress forced an insane burden for the USPS to pre-fund 75 years worth of pension obligations: there are future postal workers who have not been born yet that the post office must plan pensions for. No other government entity has such an obligation - this is the only reason the USPS is in a financial problem and it is a manufactured crisis. There is no "small government" argument here since your tax dollars don't fund them.
3) The USO pledge states that the USPS must offer affordable rates to customers. Privatized companies have a market incentive to keep prices low, yes, but in practice there is no way that there won't be price collusion/fixing if a handful of private carriers become market dominant. Antitrust is laughably weak in the US right now.
4) DeJoy is using the manufactured crisis from pension obligations as a canard for slashing worker benefits and overpay to the bone. He is intentionally gutting the USPS so the Republicans can point at it and whine about how socialized enterprises don't work as well as private ones. This is why all mail is so delayed right now: postal workers rely on overtime to ensure that all mail is delivered in a timely manner.
> A Republican congress forced an insane burden for the USPS to pre-fund 75 years worth of pension obligations: there are future postal workers who have not been born yet that the post office must plan pensions for. No other government entity has such an obligation - this is the only reason the USPS is in a financial problem and it is a manufactured crisis.
This is the same obligation that private company pensions need to adhere to, because that is the responsible thing to do, with the difference being that the post office has to also fund retirement medical plans since, unlike a private company, those are mandated by congress and can only be changed with congressional approval.
I don't understand why this keeping getting called out, like it is an unusual burden to be responsible. In my humble opinion I think that all government pensions should be funded, because it is not fair for us to artificially lower costs now and expect everyone's children and grandchildren in the future to somehow pay for this generation's unfunded promises.
I imagine Trump's installed someone in charge of the USPS to destabilize it in a hurry in order to erode confidence in the USPS to be able to handle mail-in voting.
Perhaps he'll get the public behind him enough to somehow stop mail-in voting if the next few months the mail system falls apart. Or if not and he loses the election, he'll blame it on the incompetent mail service and demand an election redo or whatever Trumpy things he normally does when he loses.
It seems to me that it's everything to do with the election, nothing to do with improving the USPS.
Just like you'd think a Trump sycophant would implement. Reducing services, removing equipment and cutting back on employee hours.
Mail is piling up in Iowa (where the person being interviewed is located) and from other reports all over the country.
Well maybe not in Texas or Florida where Trump depends on vote by mail.
Of course it all started as revenge against Amazon but it's nicely transitioned to manipulating the USPS for political benefits. In other words, business as usual.
Any proof that these changes wouldn't affect Texas and Florida USPS services, or that any of these changes are for political benefit?
Considering the postal union is one of the strongest democrat supporting unions, can you point to any whistleblowers or leaked documents, or any proof that this is politically motivated?
The USPS loses a lot of money. Even ignoring the pension pre-funding issue, it's still cashflow negative. For a supposedly 'private' company that constantly requires bailing out by the US government. The USPS is just another industry that the internet has decimated and mostly replaced. First class mail has fallen so much that only package delivery and junk mail is keeping the USPS (kinda) alive.
One of the Postal Services problems is that senior management comes from USPS career employees whose loyalty is to the postal service employees - not the business itself or even its customers. The USPS needs new blood at the top and it needs to start acting like a for-profit business and less like a business that has been captured by its union.
> The USPS loses a lot of money. Even ignoring the pension pre-funding issue, it's still cashflow negative.
This is untrue - without its pension pre-funding requirement it turns a modest profit each year[1].
Practically a paid advertisement by the Postal Employees Union. Okay, not practically, completely.
Having had two relatives both be Post Masters you can damn well bet the slow down of mail is totally because they are purposefully doing it and not for hours cut. You underestimate the levels they go to. Both relatives recounted days where you would have bickering constantly and having to call in RCAs because two or more permanent employees were bitching over a truck or additions to a route and no mail would go out.
This same union had incredible influence over the poor working conditions RCA drivers suffer; these are all those personal vehicles marked up with PO logos and such. All with their guaranteed day but hoping for enough days to pay their bills. All having to suffer the whims of a regular PO employees who treat most of them like dirt. All this just so they can get their permanent position. Which should be done by the RCA with most seniority but this can be sabotaged quite easily by the regulars.
Sorry, this piece is election year drivel and you can expect story after story on every subject sure to come up in ads
> Both relatives recounted days...
The plural of anecdote is not data. Do you have anything solid to back up your claim that it is the postal union slowing down the mail service as a political move?
That's a bold statement and requires some strong evidence for me to believe it.
They are working fewer hours because the administration has forbidden overtime.