EDITORIAL: Mail delivery is a vital service of democracy—not ‘a joke’

Every Thursday, men and women in blue-gray uniforms, walking at a lively clip with arms full of envelopes, packages, magazines and newspapers, deliver thousands of copies of Ozaukee Press to homes and businesses in Ozaukee County and the surrounding area.

They are the mail carriers of the U.S. Postal Service. Millions of readers of weekly newspapers in communities all over the country depend on them to be informed with news about their local government, schools, businesses and their fellow citizens.

That is only one role of the agency that delivers America’s mail, an average of 472 million pieces per day, everything from personal letters to Social Security checks, mail-in ballots, tax refunds and, during the pandemic, stimulus checks.

The Postal Service is a necessity of life in this country, and Americans appreciate it. A Pew Research Center poll in 2019 found that 90% of the public has a favorable view of the USPS, making it the most popular government agency, ahead of even the National Park Service and NASA.

How strange then that the Postal Service is a frequent target of political bullying that hinders its mission, burdens it with onerous requirements and starves it of adequate funding. This month, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin blocked emergency pandemic relief funding for the agency, which has been put in financial peril by the shutdown of the economy. In supporting the move, President Trump called the Postal Service a “joke.”

The Postal Service is not a joke, at least not in the eyes of the public it serves and the almost 500,000 people who work for it, but it has long been a political punching bag. It’s an easy target because it has been losing money for years.

Congress is to blame for a large part of the agency’s losses. In 2006, it imposed a mandate no other government agency has to meet. The Postal Service is required to prefund decades worth of health insurance premiums for future retirees. The mandate, which costs an average of $5.4 billion per year, was the cause of 100% of the agency’s losses between 2013 and 2018.

As it struggles with the onerous prefunding requirement, it has to meet other congressional mandates—that it finance its operations as though it were a business and provide mail service to 300 million addresses in every part of the country at a flat rate.

 Meanwhile, its existence is threatened year after year by critics who say it should be severed from government and privatized.

That is the opposite direction the Postal Service should be going. Of all agencies serving the public, this one should be a pure function of government, funded by congressional appropriation.

George Washington and James Madison pushed Congress to establish the Postal Service because they viewed it as an essential element of democracy that would reliably deliver information to citizens. It was not meant to be a business enterprise, but rather, a service to the public on a par with defense and treasury departments.

Excluding the Postal Service from emergency pandemic funding was especially egregious, for at a time when millions of Americans are quarantined in their homes, the work of the mail carriers who deliver letters, checks and even prescriptions has never been more necessary.          

 Without further delay, Congress should authorize the emergency funding needed to keep the Postal Service solvent, and then, for the longer term, restore its status as a government department with funding as needed to augment the billions in revenue it earns with fees for its services.

 Newspapers like Ozaukee Press help provide that revenue with their postage payments. As valuable customers, newspapers expect reliable delivery service and usually get it. There are exceptions now and then, as the readers who call the Press office to report their newspaper was not delivered on Thursday know well. The USPS is a complex operation and perfection is an unrealistic expectation. Still, it gets the job done, thanks in large part to well-run local post offices and their steady carriers.

Yes, steady, even in a pandemic. In the coronavirus crisis, mail carriers are braving infection to do their duty six days a week. It would be fitting to amend that famous tribute to mail men and women to read: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night nor deadly pandemic stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”