Don't mess with my mail

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."

                 – Dr. Charles W. Eliot, "The Letter"

Back in 2006, a lame duck Republican Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), a law that required the U.S. Postal Service to provide $72 billion pre-funding for post-retirement health care costs 75 years into the future. It had to meet that funding within the span of 10 years.

Think about that: potential postal employees not even born yet are guaranteed health benefits. No other government agency, and most private corporations, are required to provide such a benefit. Most benefit programs are pay-as-you-go.

That law basically took a self-sufficient and self-sustaining operation to the brink of bankruptcy with 13 consecutive years of million-dollar (perhaps more) losses.

In 2019, the USPS was required to pay $4.6 billion into the fund. But already crippled by the law, the USPS has defaulted on its payments since 2010.

There is some conjecture that the PAEA was designed to bankrupt the USPS in order to institute privatization of mail delivery.

Not only that, funds intended for that program have been diverted to help pay off the national debt.

In February of this year, the House of Representatives passed the USPS Fairness Act to repeal the PAEA. The bill currently sits idle in the Senate.

Fast forward to now. Under newly installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a megadonor to President Trump (thus raising a conflict of interest in what is supposed to be a nonpartisan appointment) and who has no USPS experience, claims a mandate to make the service more efficient and to operate more like a business (It's not a business; it's a service). In doing so, he has removed almost 500 sorting machines throughout the country, limited (or perhaps eliminated) overtime, and even attempted to remove some of those familiar blue-box mailboxes.

One argument we hear for reorganizing the Post Office is that overall first-class mail volume is down overall. And that may be true. But coming less than 80 days before an election, it's also abominable. And guess what? Christmas is coming. I don't see how this makes America great again.

The obvious consequence of all this is that mail delivery is inevitably slowing down. This is critical, coming as it does in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of an election year in which mail-in balloting seems to be more popular than ever as people hope/try to avoid possible Covid-19 infection while waiting in long, slow-moving voting lines. The moves to deconstruct the Post Office appear to be insidiously intentional and obstructionist.

It's bad enough that mail-in balloting could be hindered by DeJoy's actions, but delays in mail delivery for prescriptions is appalling, putting peoples' health at risk. And what happens when monthly bills not only arrive weeks late, but also past due? Are grace periods to be extended?

The seeds of our current postal system were planted by founding father Benjamin Franklin, when he was appointed Postmaster General by the Second Continental Congress on July 26, 1775 (before there was an United States). More than 245 years later, I can't imagine this current state of affairs is what Franklin had in mind.

It's almost un-American.