When Congress Restored Saturday Mail, They Sent You the Bill

A gang of eight is reportedly making great progress in drafting a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Nothing like a disastrous election to awaken Republicans to the absent Latino vote. And the Senate even passed a budget for the first time in four years. Nothing like a threat from the House that they wouldn’t get paid if they didn’t.

So you’d think the suddenly responsive Congress would long ago have acted on something else the public likes: getting their mail.

The U.S. Postal Service lost $15.9 billion last year. That’s $50 million every day of delivery. It’s on the verge of collapse. Consumers now pay bills online, communicate in e-mail, and chat on phones that are virtually part of their anatomy. That’s caused first class mail to plunge — down 25% since 2006 alone — sinking the USPS deep in debt.

Any CEO of only modest competence would have taken drastic measures long ago to right that sinking ship, but the USPS is no ordinary business. A supposedly independent agency, its vital decisions are in the hands of Congress — which excels at doing little, and in the case of the postal service, does nothing. We first wrote of the dilemma USPS management faces back in August 2011, and again in March of last year, and congressional irresponsibility dates from well before then.

By statute, the Postmaster General, currently Patrick Donahue, can take little structural action. One step he had been advocating was to end Saturday delivery, a move that would save $2 billion a year, he says. Finally, faced with Congress’ continual failure to do its job, he went and did it anyway, announcing in February that beginning in August service would be cut to five days.

Congress’s reaction? They tacked onto funding legislation an edict that forbids the service from ending Saturday service. Its members were full of indignation at the gall of the Postal Service presuming to manage its own show. Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Ks) said, “Eliminating Saturday delivery is not a solution”. He thinks it’s the service’s shortcomings that are the problem, that “smart reforms … to make sure the Postal Service can compete in a digital world” are the answer, but the “new business model” that would permit the USPS to dream up entrepreneurial services are precisely what Congress’s indifference has year after year failed to authorize.

Other reactions were just muddle-headed. Gerald Connoly (D, Va) somehow concluded that canceling Saturday delivery would “exacerbate USPS revenue losses” [emphasis added] and that it would “contribute to the decline of this constitutionally mandated service to all Americans”. He was not the only one who mention the Constitution, but it says only, “To establish Post Offices and Post Roads”. That can be interpreted only two ways, it would seem: either government did its establishing long ago and has no business forever tethering the postal system to its leash; or, a government-run service was intended and the postal service should never have been set adrift to fund itself.

Polls show that 70% approve of the reduced delivery schedule, but Democrats are alarmed that postal union members will lose their jobs, Congress members of all stripes seem only to hear from complainers, and votes trump “any rational analysis of our current financial condition and business options”, as postal management says. The USPS is not directly funded by taxpayer dollars, but to cover its losses, it must borrow from the government. So with no way to repay, mandated Saturday delivery is a $2 billion charge handed back to taxpayers, as is the rest of the money it must borrow.

But not to worry, Congress says it will take up the Saturday question — in a couple of years.

Donahue is desperate to make the reforms necessary to put the service on a sound financial footing. To overcome that $15.9 billion annual deficit and counteract the steady decline in volume requires deep cutbacks for an operation that is the nation’s second largest employer after Wal-Mart. The postmaster general wants to eliminate 220,000 of 522,000 postal jobs, and along with them shutter 252 of 487 mail processing centers. He wants to reduce business hours at 13,000 post offices (some 80% lose money, and he had wanted to close nearly 3,700 but there’s a federal stricture that forbids closing post offices for solely economic reasons).

But Saturday delivery is far from the biggest problem Congress has failed to deal with. In 2006, they and the Bush administration unaccountably passed a law that requires the USPS to fund in advance — and do so across a mere ten years — 75 years of future retirees’ pension benefits. No other government agency suffers this colossal burden. It comes to $5.5 billion a year, and the USPS per force defaulted last year. It had already bled $49 billion into this fund and, facing by September projected cash that will cover less than three days of operations, it simply doesn’t have money.

Our question: The 9% who approve of Congress. What inspires their approval?