The Postal Service, our oldest civilian institution, is in grave danger from the new coronavirus and President Donald Trump sounds eager to strike the mortal blow.
On Friday, the president threatened to block $10 billion in borrowing authority authorized by Congress unless the USPS raises its package mailing prices by “approximately four times.”
Trump’s target is Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post and e-commerce giant Amazon. But the collateral damage would be vast.
Postal package rates would be far higher than those of FedEx or UPS, which could then raise theirs — to everybody.
The Postal Service would very likely go under, at a time when we need it more than ever to handle voting by mail in the face of the coronavirus.
That of course, would serve another of Trump’s irrational vendettas. He has it in his head that mail voting favors Democrats, even though people who know anything about it say it doesn’t. Wisconsin’s recent vote was a rare exception. In Florida, Republicans turned out far more mail-in ballots than Democrats in 2016 and 2018.
The Postal Service was already endangered before the new coronavirus came along to depress mailings and revenue. It has been in the red for 13 years and was struggling under questionable burdens that Congress imposed.
Now, revenue is down by nearly a third from this time last year, and the USPS is warning that it could run out of cash by September without assistance from Congress.
The administration cannot back up Trump’s oft-repeated claim that postal rates subsidize Amazon and other mass mailers. The Post’s fact-checkers ruled that false, citing uncontested USPS findings that package rates cover from 138 to 189% of the delivery costs, as allowed by law. Nevertheless, the Treasury Department argues rates don’t fully cover “institutional costs” that ought to be attributed to package delivery.
The Treasury’s defense means the USPS couldn’t raise rates as Trump demands without breaking the law.
Despite a myriad of competing ways to move merchandise and information, the Postal Service is as indispensable as ever and in one sense more so. There is no other institution, commercial or private, with the capacity to securely handle voting by mail, the contagion-free alternative to voting in person that is in great and growing demand.
It is intolerable that there should be anything partisan, or even in question, about preserving a viable Postal Service. Yet Trump threatened to veto the $2.2 trillion emergency appropriation if Congress included money to keep the U.S. mail coming. The $10 billion in borrowing authority for USPS was the best that could be had.
The president either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the Postal Service doesn’t control its own pricing.
The 1970 law that made the service an independent government corporation took away Congress’s power to set mailing rates and lodged it in a new agency, the five-member Postal Regulatory Commission. The service itself has only limited flexibility.
The regulatory commission consists of five presidential appointees who have a complicated law to apply.
Congress in 2006 imposed an unparalleled burden by requiring the Postal Service to prefund its health benefits 75 years into the future for the sake of employees not yet born.
For most of our history, the Post Office was a Cabinet Department, local postmasters were appointed or fired depending on who won the White House, and Congress set postal rates. The 1970 law was intended to get the politics out.
In February, the House voted 309 to 106 to scrap the prefunding requirement, but the bill has gone into the Senate’s dead-letter box. Other proposed legislation would ease the health care burden by requiring retirees to enroll in Medicare Part B.
In December, the Postal Regulatory Commission proposed rules that would give the Postal Service more flexibility in raising its charges. The docket is flooded with objections and delays.
It may be in the back of some minds — one hopes not — that getting rid of the Postal Service would stimulate political contributions from PACs and individuals associated with its competitors, including FedEx and UPS, and eliminate unions that favor Democrats.
Whatever their merits, private delivery services are not a plausible replacement for the Postal Service. They are not obliged to serve every address in the nation, however remote or distant from the internet. Neither are they set up to handle the vast volumes of first-class mail, advertisements, catalogs and periodicals that are the Postal Service’s responsibilities. Millions of people depend on the Postal Service for their Social Security checks, their medications and other necessities.
Imagine, for a moment, that the Postal Service goes bankrupt and collapses. How much might it cost to mail a bill payment, a birthday card or an absentee ballot in the face of the pandemic? The cheapest FedEx envelope rate is $8.50.
And how much more would it strain the economy to absorb another 630,000 people out of work?
Five states now vote all or almost all by mail. Other states need that capability given the uncertainty as to when it will be safe again to vote in person.
Congress should rescue the Postal Service with the same zeal in which it voted bailout money to America’s most profitable corporations, and Trump should get, or be pushed, out of the way.
Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, what are you going to do to save the Postal Service from the president’s newest scheme?
———
©2020 Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
Visit the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) at www.sun-sentinel.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.