Above the colonnade of New York’s former main post office is the unofficial motto long associated with the U.S. Postal Service: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Those words, however nostalgic, spoke to the dependability of mail service in an unpredictable world. But nowadays, those appointed rounds in Virginia are the least swift in the nation.
Richmond has been the epicenter of a U.S. Postal Service distribution revamp that has been the epitome of dysfunction: late mail, gridlocked delivery trucks, understaffed post offices and botched machinery. Packages lying on the floor and a sleeping employee on a forklift.
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As we approach the most consequential presidential election since 1860, the rollout of the Delivering for America plan has earned a bipartisan stamp of disapproval from fuming elected officials.
The Richmond area’s USPS facility in Sandston was the first to implement Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to centralize mail sorting at 60 centers, at the expense of hundreds of smaller traditional post offices.
The goal was to create a modernized, mechanized network based on Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RP&DC), local processing centers, and sorting and delivery centers. In July, the Sandston facility became the regional RP&DC for the Richmond and Hampton Roads areas.
Since then, Delivering for America has failed to deliver its objectives.
The “serious challenges” cited in the audit by the USPS Office of Inspector General “caused additional labor and transportation costs, and it is uncertain if expected savings will be achieved. The challenges also contributed to a significant decrease in service performance for the Richmond region that continued four months after launch, even as we concluded our audit fieldwork.”
This isn’t about mere aggravation. The problems demonstrate how crucial “snail mail” remains in our internet age of online transactions and fleets of Amazon home delivery trucks.
The timely and proper function of the USPS can literally be a matter of life and death. A mail snafu caused the late delivery of hundreds of colon cancer screenings from military veterans, including an estimated 450 unusable test results dating as far back as midsummer.
As if this isn’t troubling enough, this botched rollout has implications for the upcoming election. Which brings us back to 2020 and the appointment of DeJoy by then-President Donald Trump.
DeJoy had no prior experience with the USPS. His appointment was made possible by the political dysfunction that has characterized much of the past decade; Trump had inherited an empty USPS Board of Governors after Senate infighting blocked then-President Barack Obama’s nominees.
DeJoy, at the time, was the CEO of a freight and logistics company, but his main qualifications seemed to be as a Republican fundraiser and Trump ally. Upon taking office, he began implementing austerity measures at the Postal Service in the lead-up to the presidential election amid heavy mail-in voting during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic.
By then, Trump had already politicized the Postal Service, tweeting: “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.” Four years later, his animus against mail-in voting continues unabated.
A dysfunctional Postal Service, coupled with Trump’s lies, will further erode trust in the political process.
“The reports we’ve been receiving about delayed, misplaced, or even missing mail are deeply troubling, especially as we approach crucial electoral events like the Presidential Election in November,” Richmond General Registrar Keith Balmer wrote in a blog post, adding: “I understand that these issues extend beyond mere inconvenience; they represent a fundamental threat to our democracy.”
Congress had been kicking around the Postal Service long before Trump took office. Beginning in 2006, it hastened USPS’ financial freefall with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which took the unusual step of requiring the agency to prefund future retirement health benefits.
The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 repealed that requirement. But the easy takeaway is that there are forces in government willing to take down USPS, whose essential workers struggled to get the protection they needed during the height of the pandemic.
It has long been the dream of political conservatives to privatize USPS. That should be a nonstarter because of the dubious success of privatization schemes and because the Postal Service is just that: an essential service. Bottom-line politicking should not be part of the equation.
USPS, like other venerable institutions, has been adversely affected by the emergence of the internet. Increasingly, we transact business or communicate with family and friends online. USPS mail volume has dropped precipitously, from a peak of 213 billion pieces in 2006 to 127.3 billion pieces in 2022.
But despite these trend lines, America is far from ready or able to abandon in-person mail delivery. Our nation remains mired in digital divides, be they racial, rural, economic or age-related in nature.
As always, history is context and subtext. USPS has a unique history in the African American community as an institution that played a significant role in Black uplift as a source of employment and a ladder to the middle class. One out of five postal workers in America is Black, tapping a source of federal employment dating back to the Civil War, according to an article in Jacobin magazine.
In this context, access to this employment, a neighborhood post office, timely and efficient mail delivery and timely access to the ballot are equity issues.
This revamp is saving neither money nor time. It’s only further eroding faith in both the Postal Service and the prospects for our democracy.
This plan is not delivering for Richmond or America. Return to sender.