Time For The Biden Administration To Save The U.S. Postal Service

After the November election, The New York Times reported that Donald Trump was replacing the civilian leadership at the Pentagon with unqualified Fox News commentators and his political sycophants. Trump Stacks the Pentagon and Intel Agencies With Loyalists. To What End?

Luckily, these malignant “embeds” are being weeded out by the new Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. Pentagon chief purges defense boards; Trump loyalists out:

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered hundreds of Pentagon advisory board members to resign this month as part of a broad review of the panels, essentially purging several dozen who were appointed last-minute under the Trump administration.

During the last two months of his tenure, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller removed a number of longtime members from several defense policy, health, science and business boards and replaced many with loyalists of former President Donald Trump. More than 30 of those replacements will now be forced to resign, including former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich, retired Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

This is what needs to occur across the board in the federal government. Purge all the Trump sycophants.

Which brings me to one of the biggest scandals of 2020. Remember how Donald Trump seized control of the U.S. Postal Service through a sycophant financial supporter, Post Master Louis DeJoy, to engage in voter suppression of mail ballots? It resulted in significant mail delivery delays.

When is Louis DeJoy going to be removed by President Biden?

Jake Johnson writes, Biden urged to fire Postal Service Board for complicity in “devastating arson” by Trump and DeJoy:

Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell, Jr. of New Jersey on Monday urged President Joe Biden to terminate all six sitting members of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors for their “silence and complicity” in the face of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and former President Donald Trump’s full-scale assault on the beloved government mail agency.

Today I am calling on President Biden to fire the entire Postal Board of Governors for their silence and complicity in trump and dejoy’s attempts to subvert the election and destroy the Post Office. pic.twitter.com/VGaXM8MyXT

— Bill Pascrell, Jr. 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@BillPascrell) January 25, 2021

“Through the devastating arson of the Trump regime, the USPS Board of Governors sat silent,” Pascrell wrote in a letter to Biden. “Their dereliction cannot now be forgotten. Therefore, I urge you to fire the entire Board of Governors and nominate a new slate of leaders to begin the hard work of rebuilding our Postal Service for the next century.”

While the president does not have the authority under current law to fire DeJoy—a Republican megadonor to Trump who was unanimously appointed by the USPS Board of Governors last May—Biden does have the power to remove postal governors “for cause.” At present, the board consists entirely of Trump appointees—two Democrats and four Republicans.

Pascrell argued Monday that “the board members’ refusal to oppose the worst destruction ever inflicted on the Postal Service was a betrayal of their duties and unquestionably constitutes good cause for their removal.”

Far from opposing DeJoy’s sweeping operational changes—which resulted in massively disruptive, nationwide mail delays that persisted through the November election and holiday season—USPS governors publicly praised the postmaster general, with one Republican board member gushing in September that “the board is tickled pink, every single board member, with the impact” DeJoy was having on the agency.

That glowing assessment of DeJoy’s performance during his first several months on the job did not comport with the experiences of postal workers—who in some cases resisted DeJoy’s policies—or the agency’s own internal evaluations, which showed that widespread delays followed the postmaster general’s changes.

DeJoy put his damaging policy moves on hold in August amid nationwide outrage and accusations that he was working to disrupt the election for Trump’s benefit. With the presidential election now in the past, DeJoy has recently signaled he plans to push ahead with his agenda.

In his letter to Biden, Pascrell wrote that the “continued challenges in preserving our Postal Service to survive and endure are gargantuan, and so demand bold solutions to meet them.”

“To begin that work,” Pascrell added, “we must have a governing body that can be trusted to represent the public interest.”

There are currently four vacancies in top leadership positions at USPS, including three governor spots and the deputy postmaster general role. If Biden fills the remaining vacancies—USPS governors must be confirmed by the Senate—Democrats will have a majority on the board and potentially the votes needed to remove DeJoy from office.

“Trump confessed he was wrecking USPS to rig the election. His toady Postmaster General DeJoy carried out that arson. It’s time to clean house,” Pascrell tweeted Monday. “DeJoy should be fired but also prosecuted.”

Asked about Pascrell’s demand during a briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “It’s an interesting question.”

“We all love the mailman and mailwoman,” said Psaki. “I don’t have anything for you on it. I’m happy to check with our team on it and see if we have any specifics. I’m not aware of anything, but we’ll circle back with you.”

Replacing the corrupt leadership of the USPS Board is just the first step.

Congress must still solve the financial crisis at the USPS. A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate has come together on a bill that would end the 15-year Republican sabotage of the US Postal Service. Democrats And Republicans Introduce Bipartisan Bill To Save USPS:

According to a press release from Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-OR), “Reps. Peter DeFazio (OR-04), Tom Reed (NY-23), Carolyn B. Maloney (NY-12), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01), Colin Allred (TX-32) and Senators Steve Daines (R-MT) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) today announced reintroduction of the USPS Fairness Act, bipartisan legislation to provide the United States Postal Service (USPS) much-needed financial relief by ending the agency’s burdensome prefunding mandate on future retiree health benefits.”

The purpose of the legislation, which passed the House last year with more than 300 votes is to end the mandate that the Postal Service must prefund retiree health benefits decades in advance. The insidious mandate was put in place in a 2006 law to bankrupt the Postal Service, and fulfill one of the Republican Party’s biggest privatization fantasies.

Rep. DeFazio said, “Americans depend on a reliable Postal Service. This is especially true for rural areas as well as veterans and seniors in my district, who count on six-day and door-to-door service for their mail, small businesses, and prescription medications. The unreasonable prefunding mandate has threatened the survival of the USPS and placed at risk vital services for the millions who rely on it. The prefunding mandate policy is based on the absurd notion of paying for the retirement funds of people who do not yet, and may not ever, work for the Postal Service. I’m hopeful that, under a Biden Administration, we can finally repeal this ludicrous policy, provide the USPS with critical financial relief, and take the first step towards much-needed comprehensive reform.”

The legislation has bipartisan support in the House and Senate and does stand a good chance of passage.

Joe Biden is in the White House. Democrats control Congress, which means that it is time for decades-long Republican war on the Post Office to be brought to an end.

Another proposal to make the post office profitable again – a return to postal banking (yes, we did have postal banking at one time in our history. Between 1911 and 1967, the U.S. Postal Service offered savings accounts). How the Biden administration can save the Postal Service:

Without help from the federal government, the Postal Service could run out of cash later this year. Such a financial crisis would mean laying off workers, limiting service, and worsening delays — and delays are already so bad that holiday cards mailed in early December are still being delivered in late January. In the long term, Congress could decide to privatize the Postal Service, fulfilling one of the Trump administration’s ambitions but likely denying service to millions of Americans.

While it sounds a bit odd at first, an increasingly popular idea to fix the agency’s financial woes is to give it more jobs to do. In other words, to grapple with its ongoing existential crisis, the Postal Service needs to rethink its very existence.

“There needs to be creativity and other things the post office can do, when it’s done its mission of binding the country together,” Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), told Recode. “So we’re very keen on all sorts of expanded services.”

Ideas include everything from making post offices function more like UPS stores to turning the Postal Service into a broadband provider. Mail carriers could also expand their purview and start delivering groceries and alcohol (a Prohibition-era law makes it illegal for USPS to ship alcohol). And there’s one other thing: Post offices could become banks.

President Biden can implement some of these concepts through executive orders, but others — namely the banking idea — would require action from Congress.

Conservatives have long argued that the Postal Service shouldn’t try anything new until it solves some of its own longstanding financial problems. Many of these can be traced back to 2006, when a Republican-led Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. This required USPS to prefund the health care benefits it promises future retirees in its workforce with annual payments of about $5.5 billion. [See above]. This meant that even when the agency was operating at a profit, it looked like a financial disaster on paper. Then the Great Recession happened in 2008, causing first-class mail volume to plummet and slashing the Postal Service’s revenue.

Things took another ugly turn in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. In early February, the House of Representatives had actually voted to end the prefunding mandate that’s driven the Postal Service deep into the red, but the coronavirus took over the legislative agenda just a few weeks later. The bill has been stalled in the Senate since. Meanwhile, President Trump waged a campaign against the Postal Service his entire time in office and even threatened to veto the CARES Act if it gave the Postal Service any help. The Treasury Department at one point agreed to loan the agency $10 billion — but only if it would surrender proprietary information to private-sector competitors. That loan was turned into a grant in the second coronavirus relief package.

One particularly difficult development from last year was when a top Trump donor and logistics executive named Louis DeJoy took over as postmaster general in June. He implemented new, cost-tightening policies that led to mail delays, leading many to fear that one of the president’s cronies was trying to sabotage the election and privatize the Postal Service. A judge eventually suspended DeJoy’s policies until after Election Day; when they were reinstituted, mail service dropped to a historically low level during the holiday season. The Postal Service recently added 10,000 new jobs to its sorting facilities, but still, on any given day, up to 20,000 postal workers are under quarantine, according to the APWU. More than 150 have died due to the pandemic.

Because of these upheavals, Americans took to social media last year to urge their friends to buy stamps and USPS merchandise in an attempt to bail out the agency. But the Postal Service, which has about a 644,000-person workforce, needs a lot more help than that. A USPS financial planning report for 2021 shows the agency is saddled with over $160 billion in debt, much of which can be attributed to prefunding retiree health benefits; the report also calls for “significant legislative reforms.” And although the Postal Service previously asked for a $25 billion bailout at the beginning, it hasn’t received any additional relief beyond the $10 billion grant from the Treasury.

“Envisioning the post office for the future, you can’t just fix the artificial bookkeeping things and then expect the post office to magically be fine in its previous business model,” explained Porter McConnell of the Save the Postal Office Coalition. “I think it needs to be given the ability to innovate, in order to really start being a powerhouse.”

Put differently, even if Congress pulls through with a bailout and ends the prefunding mandate mess, the Postal Service still needs to evolve to survive. The Save the Postal Office Coalition, which includes 300 groups, including the APWU, MoveOn, and Color for Change, came together not long after DeJoy joined the agency and is calling for $89 billion in emergency relief for the agency in President Biden’s first 100 days. It’s also pushing for Biden to appoint a “postal czar” who favors postal banking and reform-minded leaders to fill the four open seats on the USPS Board of Governors, which Trump had left empty in the final months of his presidency. If Biden fills all the seats, Democrat-appointed governors would make up a majority of the board, giving them the power to remove DeJoy from office and reshape the Postal Service’s role in American life.

Some ideas for how the USPS could make more money are pretty basic: Post offices could expand partnerships with other government services and do things like offer driver’s license renewals in addition to passport services. Or they could stay open later hours so people have more time to mail packages at competitive rates (some UPS and FedEx stores are open 24 hours, while post offices tend to be 9-to-5 operations). After all, package deliveries are actually a rare bright spot on the Postal Service’s balance sheet. In November, the Postal Service reported a $2 billion increase in revenue year over year thanks to a nearly 20 percent increase in package volume. Package volume during the holidays was up about 100 percent.

Other ideas are more ambitious, but you can look abroad and see that they’re viable. The Postal Service has some of the internet infrastructure required for building a nationwide network, so it could theoretically build out a low-cost internet service in the US, which is something the UK’s Post Office does (for about $20 a month). Letter carriers already stop at most addresses around the country on a daily basis, so they could help provide basic caregiving services for older adults, as Japan Post does. And the USPS needs new vehicles, so replacing its fleet of boxy, gas-powered mail trucks with electric vehicles could help build out EV charging infrastructure by setting up charging stations for public use at post offices nationwide. This would cost money in the short term, but the charging stations could generate revenue for the Postal Service, while the more efficient trucks should save money in the future.

But the really big idea for how to save the USPS — to establish a postal banking system — is easier to imagine, if only because the post office already performs several basic banking functions, like money orders. Expanding that menu of services, postal banking proponents argue, brings nothing but upsides.

One of the biggest upsides: USPS banking could help the at least 7 million American households that are unbanked — meaning they lack access to a checking account or basic financial services — according to the most recent FDIC survey on economic inclusion. That number skyrockets when you include those who have accounts but use financial services like check-cashing and payday loans to get by. The plan for postal banking would not only provide a solution for these millions of Americans but also provide the USPS with a financial lifeline.

“I would imagine that any post office of the future proposal has got to include [postal banking],” McConnell told Recode. “Serving the one in four households in America who are unbanked and underbanked [while] providing a revenue stream for the post office is just too logical to leave out of any forward-looking proposals.”

The long list of financial services that post offices could offer includes checking and savings accounts, check-cashing, low-fee ATMs, money transfers, bill payment, and refillable USPS debit cards. Offering such services could generate some $9 billion in revenue for the Postal Service every year, according to a USPS Inspector General report from 2014. Some back-of-the-napkin math suggests that this alone could cover the prefunding mandate.

With Biden in the White House and Democrats controlling Congress, lawmakers have the chance to reconsider existing postal banking legislation. Last September, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) reintroduced the Postal Banking Act, which would not only bring basic financial services like low-cost savings and checking accounts to post offices but also take aim at predatory practices — payday loans, high-fee prepaid debit cards, overdraft fees — that have taken advantage of unbanked and underbanked Americans. Additionally, the law would allow the Postal Service to offer small-dollar loans that could eliminate the market for payday loans.

“Postal banking is an elegant and commonsense solution to problems that exist across the country in urban and rural states — problems which Congress has indicated it would like to address,” Sen. Gillibrand told Recode.

Think of it as a public option for banking. And this isn’t the only approach being floated for serving the unbanked. A task force set up by Biden and Sanders earlier this year called for the creation of so-called Fed Accounts, which would be free bank accounts for every American set up by the Federal Reserve and run through post offices. This is not to be confused with Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s Public Banking Act, which would enable the Federal Reserve to encourage the establishment of public banks that could interact with postal banking infrastructure.

So in some shape or form, the Postal Service could play a role in all of these plans. But at this moment, USPS leadership doesn’t seem to like the idea of adding banking to its slate of offerings, although it’s not entirely opposed.

Recode then provides a history of postal banking in the U.S.

To learn more, see Campaign For Postal Banking. campaignforpostalbanking.org.