Breaking the post office

As we report this week, the U.S. Postal Service has implemented yet another new “reform” that’s supposed to save money. More likely, it will further erode public confidence in an entity that is purposefully being undermined by some in our nation’s capital looking to scrap one of this country’s most valuable institutions.
This latest change, in most cases, requires letting mail to sit an extra day at your local post office before it is picked up and transported to a processing facility. We can expect this will add at least one more day to the already painfully slow delivery we’re experiencing here in the North Country.
For small town newspapers, which overwhelmingly rely on the postal service for out-of-town delivery, this change is just one more blow, but the impact will be felt far beyond local newsrooms. Many residents of our region, particularly seniors, receive their prescription medications through the mail. Paychecks arrive through the mail. Official communications, whether from Social Security or the IRS, arrive through the mail. For many rural residents, election ballots arrive through the mail, and we rely on the mail once again to make sure those ballots arrive at our election centers in a timely manner. Another day of delay will have consequences all around.
Some would have you believe that these changes are necessary to keep the post office solvent. While the postal service certainly faces challenges, its biggest comes from those who want to destroy it. That may well include the current Postmaster General David Steiner, who President Trump strongly backed for the position. Steiner was, until recently, a member of the FedEx board of directors, a company that competes directly with the U.S. Post Office and would stand to benefit from its demise.
Steiner’s latest “reform” fits perfectly with the sustained effort to make the U.S. Postal Service look like a failure — not because it is failing, but because some very powerful people would prefer it to be privatized.
The playbook is not complicated: saddle the agency with impossible financial obligations, install leadership more interested in cutting service than improving it, pull out equipment, slow down delivery standards, and then point to the declining performance as proof that the government can’t run a postal service. Once people are frustrated enough, the argument for selling it off practically makes itself.
Here in northern Minnesota, we’ve watched this play out in real time. When the former Postmaster General and Trump mega-donor Louis DeJoy took over the postal service in 2020, sorting machines were pulled from processing centers around the country, including the one in Duluth. Mail a letter from Ely to Winton, and it now goes via the Twin Cities. Delivery standards that had held for decades became untenable and as service is degraded, businesses and the public begin to look for alternatives to the post office.
This is hardly the only example of sabotage directed against the post office. A 2006 law required the post office to pre-fund retiree health benefits 75 years into the future — a mandate so absurd that no other federal agency, and no private company, faces anything like it. It drained billions from the postal service annually and drove the balance sheet into the red. The manufactured losses then became the rationale for “reform.” Reform that, not coincidentally, always seemed to mean poorer service for people in places like ours.
For residents of our region, this is not an abstract policy debate. It is residents here who will be most affected if the push for privatization succeeds. Universal service — the legal requirement to deliver to every address in the country at a uniform rate — is not a feature that survives privatization.
Rural routes are expensive to serve. A private company’s obligation to shareholders does not include driving 20 miles up a forest road to deliver a piece of mail. When the cost of serving this region is no longer offset by the profitable urban routes, we’ll see what private mail service actually looks like for the North Country. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be cheap.
None of this has to happen. The manufactured financial crisis at the USPS can be unwound. The pre-funding mandate that hobbled the agency for nearly two decades has already been partially addressed, but more needs to be done. Equipment and staffing levels can be restored. Delivery standards can go back to what they were. It requires political will and public pressure — two things that, historically, the North Country knows something about.
The post offices in our communities aren’t just buildings. They represent one of the few federal institutions that shows up for us every single day, regardless of whether it’s profitable to do so. That’s what public service means. It would be a serious mistake to let that be taken from us without a fight.