Republicans Shouldn't Jump on Progressives' Mail Route

The Constitution empowers Congress to establish a postal service – but it doesn’t say anywhere in there to establish a bad one.

But a bad U.S. Postal Service appears to be what we’re stuck with nowadays. When USPS released its 2022 first quarter financial report on Tuesday, we saw just how bad things have gotten.

USPS's adjusted loss for the quarter was about $1.5 billion for the quarter. It lost $4.9 billion last year, the most recent of 15 consecutive disastrous years.

And if House Democrats get their way, they’ll make sure that the USPS stays as dysfunctional as possible for a very long time to come. As we covered back in December, they are pushing a “reform” bill that will subsidize the post office’s failed business model.

While the Democrats’ Postal Service Reform Act (PSRA) aims to – in their own words – “provide stability to and enhance the services of the United States Postal Service,” it won’t do any of that. Rather, it places direct cost onto taxpayers and the Medicare program for $44 billion (!) in debt relief while saddling USPS’ largest customer base with even more burdens that will slow down mail and make it more expensive.

While it’s had troublingly low revenues, the post office is perfectly happy to drive costs up, with new equipment, leased space, and expensive career employees. Meanwhile customer satisfaction and on-time delivery continue to fall.

The PRSA reform bill does nothing to address these concerns, nor include essential measures, like ensuring transparent-accounting cost and revenue management to point the post office is at least in the direction of functional. This Democrat bailout is designed not to help make the agency more competitive, but to subsidize its bad practices and opaque business model.

Problems created by both the actual coronavirus and the response to it have hurt everyone. Given the extra strain put on delivery services in the last two years, it would be understandable and forgivable if the post office’s shortcomings were isolated to the last very trying period of time.

But they’re not.

USPS’s operating expenses accelerated by a margin of $9 billion more in 2020, compared to generous estimates from 2014. It is forecast to lose another $160 billion over the next 10 years. Its CFOs have made grandiose promises about long-term financial viability going back to 2007, but they’ve gotten scared when it came time to make any real reform.

USPS is well on its way to fiscal calamity: it won’t survive without the U.S. taxpayer. Leaders need to make massive, profit-oriented changes to justify the agency’s continued existence. It needs to align costs with revenues, abandon unprofitable products, develop a variable pricing model, end mail delivery on Saturday, and cut hours at postal locations.

PSRA should be a non-starter for conservatives, moderates and anyone who believes in holding government accountable. Alas, it won unanimous support when the House Oversight and Reform Committee approved it in May. Its proponents want to finally move the bill forward, but bad financial results on Tuesday are yet another indicator they need to go back to the drawing board and come up with some real reform.

Who really wins with this reform? The post office gets this relief, but the agency’s leaders clearly do not have the taxpayer or the ongoing health of their agency as a priority. The e-commerce behemoths of the world win with this, because they will continue to enjoy a subsidy for their package deliveries, but it’s at the expense of everyone else who is going to have to pay more.

Seems like Jeff Bezos should be giving back to the country rather than the other way around.

USPS has not adapted to the massive technological advances of the last 20 years. We still need a post office, but we don’t need the expensive, inefficient one we’re stuck with.

Jared Whitley is a long-time politico who has worked in the U.S. Congress, White House and defense industry. He is an award-winning writer, having won best blogger in the state from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists (2018) and best columnist from Best of the West (2016). He earned his MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai. Read Jared Whitley's reports — More Here.