The USPS is in trouble: Trump is destroying the Post Office—and your ability to vote by mail

The USPS is in trouble; how Trump is destroying the Postal Service — and why.

Screenshot / YouTube

The USPS is in trouble. But the president is speeding up its demise rather than trying to save it. So only House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can save the USPS—and make vote-by-mail available to all.

Trump insists that the post office quadruple its package rates, which would cripple the US mail’s ability to compete in the one arena still largely profitable for them during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Steve Mnuchin is holding $10 billion hostage that congress allocated to the USPS as part of the CARES Act. Trump’s new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy main qualifications seem to be his immense contributions to the president and the Republican party.

Hobbling or killing the Post Office plays into GOP attempts to make it as hard as possible for Americans to exercise their right to vote this November.

Pelosi can stop this debacle—but she will have to play hardball on the next stimulus. She will have to insist the final bill include key provisions from the recently passed HEROES Act, which ends Mnuchin’s $10 billion “blockade” and adds another $25 billion for the USPS. It also includes key provisions that enable vote-by-mail to every voter.

The Post Office is as old as the Constitution

A stylized photo of the Constitution

Pixabay

The Post Office is established in the Constitution. People rely on this service, for delivery of everything from vacation postcards to Census forms to life-saving prescriptions. The USPS “has a legal imperative to serve all US addresses,” explains Business Insider.

The United States Postal System is a vital element of our entire communications system. The poor depend heavily upon it for medical services and also for government assistance. Veterans depend on it for their compensation checks. The elderly depend on it for their Social Security checks.   — Richard Nixon

Addresses in dense cities are relatively inexpensive delivery jobs. But the Post Office is also responsible for the remote, rural addresses, which are the most costly to manage. For most of its 245-year history, the Postal Service has balanced its budget by using the relative profitability of urban areas to offset the costly service to rural areas.

And it does a great job too: the USPS has an approval rating of 90% — much higher than Trump’s.

The USPS was already in trouble

Close up photo of a mailbox

Canva

USPS troubles really started as retailers like Amazon began to ‘cherry pick,’ using their own drivers to deliver packages in the densest ZIP codes, but still having the Post Office deliver their packages in areas where addresses are further apart.

Trump insists the Post Office raise package rates 400%. The president cited, “some reason,” as his understanding of why the Post Office charges its current package rates. His calculation appeared to be based on the package rates charged by one of his perceived enemies, Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos — who owns the Washington Post.

Enter the novel coronavirus

Stylized art of coronavirus

Pixabay / Gerd Altmann

The other most profitable deliveries that the Post Office makes are First Class letters and marketing mail. People do more and more of their business online and find their coupons on the internet, so this cash flow was already slowing.

The USPS troubles only increased during the pandemic. As the coronavirus began to move through the US, “first-class mail volume fell 15 to 20 percent week to week,” reports the Washington Post. “Marketing mail, the hardest-hit segment, tumbled 30 to 50 percent week to week.” Congress included a $10 billion loan to the USPS on the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which Trump threatened to veto.

Losing the Post Office will strand Trump supporters

Wikimedia

For those without an internet connection, the mail can be their only method of correspondence, and for the ill or elderly, a lifeline. No mail would be a catastrophe during the coronavirus pandemic, at a time people rely even more on package delivery.

If the USPS collapses, this will leave many rural citizens without reliable — or any — mail. Trump’s election included a lot of states with largely rural populations. Come November, if there is no Post Office to deliver mail-in ballots, Trump voters could be out of luck. So keeping USPS troubled but just limping along might be a better plan.

The Post Office has been denied its CARES Act funding

A photograph of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinks you can live on $120 a week. Twitter not so much. 1

Screenshot / YouTube

Trump backed down on his threat and signed the CARES Act, but made it clear at the signing that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin should hold back the money. Now Mnuchin is putting “certain criteria” on the loan before he will release the relief funding. So the USPS troubles are still looming.

The rope-a-dope

"Too scared, too small, too weak": Blistering new viral Biden ad shreds Trump for his failure to lead 1

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While Mnuchin is keeping the purse strings knotted, Trump continues to push his package rate increase. This increase would likely price the Post Office out of competition, as private delivery services emerged in zip codes where they could make a profit. Meanwhile the USPS, troubled as it is, would still be serving every citizen — as long as it could, anyway.

Trump’s new postmaster general could be the knockout punch

Yahoo FInance

Trump’s new postmaster general has given millions of dollars to the Trump campaign and the Republican party. Once the CEO of a North Carolina company, Louis DeJoy is now in charge of the nation’s Post Office, and it does not look like he is helping the USPS out of trouble.

In his memo titled, “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan,” he warned that if the Post Office did not adapt, it would be “gone,” like US Steel. Whatever DeJoy’s expertise is, it obviously does not include mastering a fifteen-second-Google-fact-check before hitting ‘send’ on his motivational speeches. As the graph above shows, US Steel has not exactly disappeared.

Mañana…adios democracia

Snow covered mail boxes

Unsplash/Matthew T Rader

Postmaster General Dejoy’s memo also advises letter carriers to leave mail for the next day. “If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” DeJoy wrote. This runs precisely counter to USPS practices: letter carriers are trained to deliver all of the day’s mail each day. The problem with Dejoy’s new plan is immediately apparent; leaving one day’s work for the next will have an exponential effect, as deliveries lag later and later.

But later and later seems to be the goal. As COVID-19 kills more and more Americans, using absentee balloting in this year’s election is one obvious way to cut down on a huge source of potential infection. Trump and the Republicans seem to want to suppress votes, particularly among young and minority voters.

If Vote by Mail becomes universal, the next step to suppress mail-in ballots is to keep them from counting.

A late absentee ballot is a vote not counted

A photograph of a paper vote being inserted into a ballot box.

Unsplash

Mistakes on an absentee ballot can cause it to be rejected, but so can late arrival. If a ballot does not arrive by the deadline, it does not count. An NPR analysis found at least 65,000 votes have arrived too late to count in elections around the country this year alone, “often through no fault of the voter.” In Montclair, N.J., the mayor was elected by only 195 votes, but over 1,100 ballots (nearly 10% of all of the votes) were rejected because of mistakes or late arrival.

One of Trump’s advisor’s openly admitted that “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes.” If all mail is delayed, an accurate count could take months — or never happen. If some Post Offices were slowed down while others ran at top speed, that could result in a far more sinister tilting of balance.

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