Postal service forced to deliver bad news
It’s about high time we take the United States Postal Service out back and shoot it, right?
After all, with news last week that the federal agency wants to eliminate Saturday delivery piled on top of the fact that it lost $15.9 billion (with a “b”) last year, and it’s hard not to see the USPS as the poster child for inefficient government services that waste taxpayer money. I mean, let’s be honest, that the Postal Service is a stinking cesspool of mismanagement is a given.
And it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Let’s start with the biggest misconception about the agency: How much money does the Postal Service take from taxpayers?
If you answered “practically zero,” well congratulations. (You may move ahead two spaces.)
The Postal Service had a $70.634 billion budget in 2011. Of that total budget, 0.0014 percent comes from the federal government and is used to reimburse the USPS for postage-free services for blind Americans and mail-in ballots from overseas. The rest of the postal budget — 99.9986 percent — comes from sales of postage.
So 46 cents at a time, the Postal Service delivers 160 billion pieces of mail a year — nearly half of the entire planet’s mail. That’s a simply stunning bargain, if you pause to actually think about it. You may marvel at FedEx or UPS being able to get your packages to your house in one day, but you better believe it costs more than a couple quarters.
Add to that the 227,000 mail routes the Postal Service runs to 151 million mailing addresses across the country and the fun fact that more than 21 percent of FedEx packages get to their final destination in the back of a USPS truck and you’re starting to see what a truly impressive thing the Postal Service really is. (Next to Paul Rudd, it’s probably the most valuable thing that average Americans take for granted.)
So, to recap, the Postal Service, for 46 cents, will send your letter to any corner of the country and is doing the grunt work of for-profit shippers and somehow that’s a bad deal.
Of course, it’s undeniable that the Postal Service is in a bad way, so what exactly is the Postal Service’s problem, you ask?
Turns out, it’s not snow or sleet or hail — or even the Internet — that poses the real problem for the USPS. Nope, that distinction belongs to Congress, which has tied both hands behind the agency’s back and tossed it in the river.
The Postal Service has been hamstrung at every turn by Congress, according to the Associated Press : “The majority of the service’s red ink comes from a 2006 law forcing it to pay about $5.5 billion a year into future retiree health benefits, something no other agency does. Without that payment — $11.1 billion in a two-year installment last year — and related labor expenses, the mail agency sustained an operating loss of $2.4 billion for the past fiscal year, lower than the previous year.”
So take out Congress’ meddling and the Postal Service’s $15.9 billion loss shrinks dramatically to $2.4 billion, which, considered how few people actually send letters these days, is pretty impressive. (The Postal Service is legally mandated to not make a profit, for the record.)
So what’s Congress’ rationale for it’s Postal shenanigans? John Tierney of Salon.com finds an all-too-familiar cause: craven politics.
“We have allowed the U.S. Congress to control the agency, and for decades — centuries, really — Congress has dictated that the Postal Service operate in ways that are politically useful for members of Congress even though they make no economic sense,” he writes. “In the process, our elected representatives have steered the agency into a ditch.”
And it’s Congress’ cockamamie interference in the Postal Service that makes this USPS proposal to drop to a 5-day delivery schedule such a delight to see. The Postal Service has long wanted to make the move — it’s a common sense way to cut costs — but Congress has long included a ban on a 5-day schedule in its bills, despite the fact it will help the Postal Service stay afloat and public polling supports it.
Yet this year, in a rare instance of Congress’ ineptitude coming back to bite it, the Postal Service might sneak it through. That’s because since Congress was unable to pass an appropriations bill and is therefore under a temporary spending measure, the Postal Service can try to use that loophole to its advantage.
So while the Postal Service looking to cut back on delivery might seem like a sign of weakness, it’s really a long-deserved attempt to wrest some control over its future from the dunderheads in Congress who have set it up to fail.
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If you realize the irony of sending an email about a column on the Postal Service, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.