A pair of posts this morning have me hearing that head shake sound effect from Warner Brothers cartoons. In the first, Judd Legum at Popular Information exposes more on how Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is fouling up the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) core mission to serve the public:
This month, DeJoy will begin implementing a plan that will fundamentally alter the core mission of the United States Postal Service (USPS) — the rapid delivery of first-class mail. Many of the letters, bills, small parcels, and other documents sent through first-class mail will take much longer to arrive at their destination.
Prior to October 1, all domestic first-class mail was supposed to arrive at its destination in one to three days. Under the new standard, 31 percent of first-class mail is now subject to a new standard of four to five days. Only mail sent to locations within a three-hour drive is expected to arrive within two days.
For some people, this won’t be an issue. They’ve already shifted much of their essential communication online. But many people have not. People “in rural areas, the disabled and the elderly” will be hit especially hard. While everything in the world keeps getting faster, essential aspects of their lives will now slow down.
A related effort by DeJoy that slowed down mail in 2020 “snarled everything from prescription medication to election ballots.” Slow mail can result in “delayed checks, credit card penalties, …missed court appearances” and other issues. It also makes mail-in voting, which Trump has falsely asserted is a vehicle for significant election fraud, more difficult to execute.
DeJoy, the live-action cartoon villain, has been shifty since taking control of the agency under Donald Trump. He came in as a Trump fundraiser with no experience with USPS, conflicts of interest, and that run-it-like-a-business sensibility that gets office employees sprucing up resume the way talk of “shareholder value” does.
DeJoy plans to cut costs by limiting the use of planes to move the mail. The former trucking company executive likes trucks the way Brett Kavanaugh likes beer. Slowing down the mail will save the agency $169.5 million annually, “less than a quarter of one percent of the total FY 2020 operating expenses of $82 billion.” (The Postal Regulatory Commission adjudges that estimate inflated.) DeJoy will make the service less useful for the public but, you know, more efficient while not improving its baseline financial situation. That was undermined by the 2006 decision by Congress to require USPS to pre-fund 75 years of retiree benefits.
DeJoy wants to “participate more fully in the strengthening U.S. market for package delivery services.” Legum writes that DeJoy means to put more emphasis on the more lucrative package-delivery market as though USPS is a commercial service not a public service.
The head shake
The second post regarding USPS comes from David Dayen at The American Prospect:
The United States Postal Service (USPS) has taken the most dramatic step in a half-century to re-establish a postal banking system in America. In four pilot cities, customers can now cash payroll or business checks of up to $500 at post office locations, and have the money put onto a single-use gift card. It’s the most far-reaching executive action that the Biden administration has taken since Inauguration Day.
The move puts the USPS in direct competition with the multibillion-dollar check-cashing industry, which operates storefronts to allow unbanked or underbanked residents to cash their paychecks.
According to USPS spokesperson Tatiana Roy, the pilot launched on September 13 in four locations: Washington, D.C.; Falls Church, Virginia; Baltimore; and the Bronx, New York.
While limited for now, the resurrection of postal banking (shut down in 1967 after 56 years, Dayen explains) could eventually put USPS in direct competition with Walmart and commercial check-cashing services while enhancing USPA revenues. Postal banking could but access to financial services within reach of millions in every ZIP code in the country via USPS’s 31,000 facilities:
More surprising is that DeJoy is rolling out the pilot program in concert with the postal union:
“Offering new products and services that are affordable, convenient and secure aligns with the Postal Service’s Delivering for America 10-year plan to achieve financial sustainability and service excellence,” said USPS spokesperson Roy in a statement to the Prospect. “This pilot, which is in collaboration with the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), is an example of how the Postal Service is leveraging its vast retail footprint and resources to innovate.”
THAT COLLABORATION, and the USPS rolling out a key financial-inclusion product that progressives have championed for years, is what makes the announcement so staggering. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has become a high-profile villain to liberals since taking over last May, condemned for almost immediately causing significant slowdowns of mail, as well as ethical concerns surrounding the USPS awarding contracts to the company he previously ran. DeJoy’s ten-year plan, rolled out this year, would cement this dysfunction by permanently slowing target delivery times and raising prices for some first-class mail, particularly around the holidays.
The APWU has consistently criticized DeJoy. Last Thursday, union president Mark Dimondstein criticized the changes to service standards, saying: “The people deserve the prompt, reliable and efficient mail service promised under the law … We believe management’s response to months of poor performance should be to improve service and regain the public’s trust, instead of this focus on moving the goalposts and slowing service standards.”
Few would have named DeJoy as the official who would set in motion the most consequential executive action of President Biden’s first term. And even fewer would have correctly pegged that he would do it in cooperation with the APWU, one of his biggest antagonists. But the union has been laser-focused on getting postal leadership to embrace banking for many years, seeing it as an attractive product to bring in customers and promote financial inclusion.
Dayen has more details on how the cards would work. But for now, DeJoy is helping Biden expand services the administration has identified that require no additional authority from Congress. I’m glad to see it and look forward to its spread.
But I’m not ready to trust the Trumpist in charge of it.