Not surprisingly, postal carriers have been tagged as essential employees during the coronavirus pandemic providing a service considered too important to shut down.
We rely on postal carriers to deliver personal and business correspondence, periodicals such as ours, Social Security checks and prescriptions during normal times and personal protective equipment now.
It is not surprising that these carriers, like many essential workers, have experienced higher rates of infection than the general public. Some local post offices, where carriers stand side by side as they sort the mail, have been working with just half the usual manpower due to carriers getting sick.
The United States Postal Service has also become increasingly important to the political process.
Millions of census forms were delivered to American households through the mail last month with the expectation that many will be filled out and returned the same way. That census information will help determine everything from how much federal aid we receive to how many representatives we have in Congress.
Then there are our elections.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order last Friday that calls for annual school board meetings, elections and budget votes to be held June 9 – by absentee ballot that is to be sent and returned by mail.
Cuomo had earlier cleared the way for all New Yorkers to cast absentee ballots in the June 23 primary elections.
One would expect the use of mail-in and absentee voting will be greatly expanded in New York and every other state through the fall – from village elections to the presidency – to ensure that Americans do not have to risk their lives to cast their votes.
But the Postal Service faces two problems that threaten its service.
The first is that the agency, which has 600,000 employees, could run out of money in September, according to Postmaster General Megan Brenan.
The second is that the Trump administration is threatening to block that aid at least until it raises shipping rates for online companies like Amazon.com.
President Trump has long accused the Postal Service of charging too little for packages, saying that deliveries for Amazon and others cost the service money. This is not true.
The Postal Service’s package business is one of the few areas where it has made a profit and others have warned that a significant increase in price could drive private companies to pursue alternatives.
What is true is that Amazon’s chief executive is Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post – a newspaper that Trump has accused of unfair coverage.
Conservatives have also long seen the Postal Service as an obstacle to their vision of small government. Some support its full privatization.
And then there is the opposition of Trump and his allies to expanded use of mail-in ballots nationwide. Even during a pandemic in which many of the administration’s own health officials view the expanded use of mail-in ballots as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer and curtail the spread of the coronavirus.
But many Republicans don’t believe that allowing more people to vote is in their interests.
Trump said that under the Democrats’ plans for a national expansion of early voting and voting by mail “you’d never have a Republican elected in the country again.”
Still, Trump is not wrong that the Postal Service needs reform.
Like many businesses, the Postal Service has been hit hard by the coronavirus.
Mail volume is down nearly a third over this time last year and continues to fall, according to The New York Times. The Postal Service is predicting $13 billion in lost revenue this year as a direct result of the coronavirus.
But its problems did not start with the coronavirus.
The United States Postal Service has lost $69 billion over the past 11 fiscal years.
Part of that can be attributed to a dramatic reduction in its first-class business – a decline partially offset by its move into the package delivery business.
Another part is a bill passed by Congress in 2006 that requires the agency to set aside $5.5 billion per year to prepay health care benefits for future retirees. This is a requirement that no other company or government agency has.
According to one report, the agency would have turned a profit in each of the past six years were it not for this burden.
Congress has also stepped in on various occasions when the Postal Service attempted to rein in costs by closing offices or cutting service.
This has been an ongoing theme.
Even though the post office has been self-financed since the 1980s and all revenue is derived from postal postage and postal services, Congress has repeatedly prevented the post office from making its own decisions.
Laws restrict the post office’s ability to raise prices and cut costs. And Congress has often prevented the post office from going into new businesses.
It is hard to believe that Congress and the Trump administration would not come to the rescue of an agency whose employees are risking their health and, in some cases, their lives to ensure that Americans receive their prescriptions and protective equipment during this pandemic.
Not to mention such essential items as Social Security checks, your weekly newspaper and the ability for you to safely cast your vote.
But then again who would have expected us to be where we are today.
