PRESS EDITORIAL: Give post offices what they need to do their vital job

Just deliver the mail.

Stop the political conniving and the foolish talk about making mail delivery a for-profit business.

Let post offices do their job.

Doing that job well has never been more essential than it is at this moment in the 231-year history of the American mail service.

Yet at this moment the U.S. Postal Service is being forced to cut back on the reliability and timeliness of mail delivery to the point where last week it warned election officials in all 50 states it might not be able to deliver mailed November-election ballots in time to be counted.

The prospect of that failure threatens the integrity of an election that will be held when the country is in the unyielding grip of the pandemic and voting by mail is the necessary option for millions of voters.

Mail service slowed after the new postmaster general eliminated overtime, took mail sorting equipment and mailboxes out of service, reduced post office hours and crippled the postal employees’ ethic of working until all of the day’s mail was processed.

The newly appointed head of the Postal Service, Louis DeJoy, has contributed millions of dollars to the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump. President Trump has threatened to block emergency funding for the postal service because he doesn’t want to it used for mail-in voting.

Some observers have put those facts together and concluded that political skullduggery is at work in the specter of the Postal Service being unable to deliver ballots on time. There is enough smoke to pursue that line of thinking, but even if there were no political taint to DeJoy’s mail service changes they would be a disservice to the public.

DeJoy, the Postal Service CEO, leans on the cannard that the agency must be run like a business that is self-sustaining without subsidy from taxpayers. That was not the intention of the nation’s founders who, acting with the conviction that it was the responsibility of government to provide citizens with a secure and private form of communication, empowered Congress in the U.S. Constitution to “establish post offices.”

The USPS cannot be a business. Businesses exist to make money. The Postal Service exists to provide a vital government service.

In 1971, Congress made the mistake of turning the U.S. Post Office into the U.S. Postal Service with the requirement that it be funded solely with its own revenue without help from taxpayers. No other government agency has ever been forced to operate under such a mandate.

Postal Service revenue has not been adequate to support the agency in recent years, and losses have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. Federal funding is needed now and must be included in the stimulus bill being debated in Congress.

Regardless of how it’s funded, the Postal Service gives the American people good value. A ranking by the British firm Oxford Strategic Consulting found the USPS to be the best mail service of any advanced nation. The study concluded that in handling 40% of the world’s mail volume, America’s mail carriers delivered more letters and parcels—nearly 300,000 items per carrier to 151 million addresses in a year—than any other country.

The USPS has the capacity to deliver the expected deluge of more than a million ballots on time, experts say, pointing out that in the month before Christmas mail carriers routinely deliver billions of cards, letters and packages. But to do that, the Postal Service needs taxpayer funding and its workforce must not be fettered with ill-timed, misguided cost-cutting restrictions. It has to be allowed to do its job.

Just deliver the mail.