The United States Postal Service has been feeling the heat since April, but things have reached an alarming boiling point this week. Yesterday was an especially unsettling day. The President called into Fox Business News for an interview yesterday morning and defended his decision to withhold $25 billion of financial assistance that Congress allocated to the USPS as part of the CARES Act at the end of March. In his own words, Trump said “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots…But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.”
This is clearly an open, obvious attempt to disrupt the USPS, and it's intended to accomplish several things: 1) Dissuade and slow mail-in voting delivery, 2) Remove a safe voting option during a once-in-a-century pandemic, and 3) Sow so much discord and chaos that the election outcome is called into question no matter the result. The President is admitting out loud that he’s trying to interfere with the election by sabotaging the Post Office. And again, it's not a matter of funding. Congress has already appropriated the money to help the USPS stay afloat and secure mail-in voting. All the Treasury Department has to do is release the money, but Trump is refusing to let them.
The last few weeks, I’ve seen headline after headline asking some version of “Is Trump using the USPS to interfere with the election?” Here’s an idea, folks: How about we stop asking questions like this and instead start framing it in the form of a statement: “Trump is sabotaging the USPS to win an election. Now is the time to start caring about that.”
What’s bizarre about this whole thing is that at a time when Americans are deeply divided about just about everything, we’re pretty much united in our appreciation for the Postal Service. As recently as April, Pew Polling showed that 91% of Americans trust and respect the USPS. But since then, Trump has been doing everything he can to try to dismantle that trust.
In early April, then-Postmaster General Megan Brennan told the House Oversight and Reform Committee that the USPS was likely to experience a $13 billion drop in revenue by the end of this fiscal year without federal help. Because the USPS relies not on taxes, but on the sales of postal products (stamps, boxes, etc.) to support it, revenues are dropping sharply. Brennan said at the time that if Congress didn’t intervene, the USPS could be financially insolvent by the end of summer.
This is exactly what Republicans have been trying to accomplish for decades. Any government agency that is seen as a model of efficiency or that seems to provide a necessary service is a threat to a party that values corporate privatization above all. For 20 years, the GOP has been trying to gut the USPS’ funding so that the service could be transitioned into a privately owned entity. In order to do that, Republicans have done everything they could to make the USPS seem like a model of inefficiency. They’ve tried to break it so they could claim it doesn’t work.
In 2006, under the oversight of George W. Bush and a GOP-led House and Senate, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required the USPS to prefund 75 years of pension benefits in just 10 years. The PAEA cost the USPS $110 billion and had the intended effect of financially choking off the money that allowed the organization to run smoothly.
It wasn’t just Congress that caused the USPS to start sliding into debt. The advance of technology in business (especially smart phones and email) meant that a lot of the first-class documents that once supplied dependable revenue streams were now being delivered electronically. After the 2008 recession, much of that business remained electronic and never returned to the USPS. But because the postal service is part of the federal government, its management is something that needs to be coordinated and facilitated—not impeded and crippled—by Congress and the White House.
This year, though, Trump has been trying to impair and cripple the USPS at every turn. Instead of thanking delivery men and women and pointing out what a vital service they’ve provided during an incredibly difficult year, Trump instead berates and demeans the organization constantly. At a press briefing in April, he said “I’ll tell you who’s the demise of the Postal Service, it’s these internet companies that give their stuff to the Postal Service — packages. Every time they deliver a package for Amazon or these other internet companies that deliver. These companies walk in and drop thousands of packages on the floor of the post office and say ‘deliver it.’”
Like…that’s literally how the Post Office works. That’s how it’s supposed to work. They take in and deliver packages. They’re not losing money on Amazon packages. Amazon is actually helping the USPS stay afloat, while the 2006 Congressional bill is still crippling it with debt. No other essential governmental service — not the military, not public schools, not public highways — is required to operate at a profit. But the USPS is, and Trump’s tirades about profits during a pandemic is a ridiculous way of looking at an essential public service. It’s obscene.
The USPS is a government organization that has been providing a basic public service since the 18th century. It’s enumerated in Article I of the Constitution. Its stated mission is “to provide the nation with reliable, affordable, universal mail service.” Right now, in the midst of a global health crisis, the USPS is providing a critical service by ensuring that medications, paychecks, household necessities, social security checks, and business documents are delivered to people who need them during various states of lockdown.
Postal workers have been risking their health to provide that service since March, and the organization they work for is being denigrated and threatened by the head executive of our country. And now it’s being openly sabotaged, which started in earnest back in May. On May 6th, we learned that a top donor to Trump and the Republican National Committee had been named the new Postmaster General and CEO of the United States Postal Service.
Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman and RNC fundraiser with exactly zero postal experience, has donated millions of dollars to the GOP and Trump in recent years. It was apparently a good return on investment, as a man who knows nothing about running a crucial government service became the new Postmaster General in June. Trump has been talking about upending the USPS and priming it for privatization for quite some time. As the spring turned to summer, it seemed he’d found a way to do it (in a way that lines up nicely with his pattern of rampant cronyism). When DeJoy was named, I wrote “I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that he’s making this appointment in an election year when voting by mail is a major topic of conversation due to a national health emergency. I’m sure.”
And now Trump's strategy is playing itself out pretty effectively. In an attempt to begin slow-walking the mail, Dejoy ordered the end of overtime and multiple daily deliveries in mid-July. This had the effect of delaying mail delivery, and it was the start of a month-long delivery back-up that's now becoming noticeable. Late last Friday (August 7th), DeJoy fired the top two USPS executives in charge of day-to-day operations. In all, 23 postal executives were reassigned or displaced last weekend. This purge removed most of the Postal Service’s transparency and gave DeJoy more centralized, direct control over operations.
This week, as people have started to actually feel the effects of mail delays, we also learned that the USPS has started removing sorting machines from its facilities across the country. These machines are used to sort millions of pieces of mail, and their removal means that postal employees will have to start sorting it by hand, leading to even longer delays at an organization that's already lagging and overburdened. These machines would have been used to sort ballots during election season, so there's sure to be an obvious and direct impact on a pretty important election coming up in November.
And then yesterday, Trump said the quiet part out loud. He admitted that the whole purpose of all of this is to prevent the USPS from effectively processing and handling large volumes of mail-in ballots that would help keep people safe as they cast ballots during a national health crisis. It’s not a mystery or a hypothetical anymore. He said it. This is the goal – the endgame of his Postal Service project. We don’t have to pretend anymore. We don’t have to ask questions like “Is he?” or “Will he?” We don’t have to qualify these stories with words like “possibly” or “seems to be” anymore. It’s happening. If Trump can say it, then we’re allowed to say it, too.
The only ways Republicans can win in the current political climate is if they restrict the number of people who are able to vote. They cut people from voter rolls and reduce the number of polling places in swing states, and now they're going after the mail to reduce access during a year when more people want/need to vote by mail because we're in the middle of a pandemic. Trump has already poisoned his supporters' view of voting by mail, even though he, his family, and many of his staff and advisors frequently vote by mail. Just this week, he and his wife requested mail-in ballots in Florida for next Tuesday's primary. But the hypocrisy doesn't seem to matter to him or his voters. All that matters is that he's made Republicans think that mail-in voting is rife with fraud when study after study and investigation after investigation have shown it's not. In fact, the only recent widespread voter fraud happened at the hands of Republicans in North Carolina.
But let's speculate for a minute that there are cracks that might be easy to exploit. Let's play his game for just a second. If that were true, then why wouldn't he be trying his hardest to secure voting by mail? Why wouldn't he allow the funding Congress has allocated to be used to tighten and secure the voting system — especially this year, when public health considerations should be taken seriously and given consideration? The answer is because he doesn't want to, because then more people (especially Democrats who at this point are more likely to trust mail-in voting) would be able to cast votes in a way they feel safer. Trump obviously can't have that, so the only real option is to break and cast doubt on the USPS. And that's exactly what he's doing.
Apparently one man in this country is allowed to sabotage an essential public service in an election year during a pandemic, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. How does one person have the power to do this? How do we live in a country where one man can break the fucking Postal Service to help him cheat in an election? How is that a thing that can happen in a functioning democracy? And how do the rest of the GOP Congressmen and Senators go along with it and let it just happen without saying a word or acting to stop it? How do Republican constituents who depend on the mail go along with it and not speak up? And why are Democrats on Capitol Hill not getting in front of cameras or hopping on podcasts and raising holy hell about this every single day?
This year has revealed many things about our national character, but one of the clearest to me is this: We are so incredibly broken right now. Beyond the anti-maskers and science deniers. Beyond the lack of collective will and social responsibility that has let this virus continue to rage on and escalate unchecked. Beyond all that, we just seem to be so fractured at a basic level. When this shitshow is over – whenever that finally is – there’s so very much that needs to be done to restore order and to fix the cracked and crumbling foundations of this country. If our democratic foundations and pillars are made to bear this, then they’re not foundations at all. There is no law and order. And the man who feverishly tweets "LAW AND ORDER!!!" in all caps a couple times a week will have successfully made sure that we're a nation of neither.
The United States Postal Service deserves better than this. Veterans and senior citizens who rely on medications that are now increasingly delayed deserve better than this. People who need to vote by mail because they're medically at-risk deserve better than this. We deserve better than this. But we don't if we're not willing to do something about it. We can't wait until after the election to fix this, because the whole point of Trump's strategy is to sabotage the election. We have to do what we can to stop it now. And that starts with understanding it, speaking up, telling people what's happening, and not letting it go.
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