Looking forward to the second session of the 112th Congress, many in the postal community hope that legislators will be able to act, at last, on meaningful measures to ensure a viable postal system and a financially stable Postal Service. However, despite their aspirations, those same observers will look back at the partisan discord of the last session and acknowledge the discouraging likelihood that this session will only bring more of the same. But even if there could be inter-partisan civility, the nature of political thinking still means that true reform of the Postal Service probably requires more consensus than most in Congress can muster.
Agreement at its shallowest
Given the rising awareness of the Postal Service’s crisis and, thanks to media attention, the public’s growing concern over mail service, the opportunism in most politicians motivated more and more of them to hop on the fix-the-Postal Service bandwagon last year. However, the recent attention from many in Congress to what’s going on with the agency not only failed to translate into a thoughtful and objective discussion of how to solve its many and complex problems, politicians couldn’t even agree on what needs to be fixed. Instead, the typical scenes were “concerned” legislators standing in front of cameras and microphones declaring that something needed to be done to save the Postal Service and that their legislation offered the right solution. Of course, few if any of their colleagues shared that opinion; hence the problem.
So, behind all the posing and drama, it’s clear that “Something needs to be done” is as far as the consensus goes. As soon as anyone tries to produce the list of what to do, uninformed pontification and simplistic, knee-jerk solutions often follow. A handful of legislators who might actually understand the Postal Service and the mailing industry have become the minority as other would-be postal saviors harangue anyone who’ll listen with their just-minted (and half-baked) opinions about the Postal Service’s ills and how they can fix it all.
Meanwhile, most members of the mailing community can summarize very simply what’s put the Postal Service into its current predicament (too little mail (and revenue) and too much cost) and how to fix it (try to grow volume, but trim expenses anyway).
The sources of the problem
Anyone who’s at all attentive to postal matters knows that lost volume and revenue are a major factor in the Postal Service’s condition, the by-product of increased internet and e-communications usage, and a severe recession that suppressed business activity and the availability of advertising dollars. The result is a loss of about 25% of total mail volume (and a higher proportion of postage revenue) in just a few years.
While this was happening, USPS costs were not dropping at the same pace. Though total complement was being scaled back, employee wages and benefits remained at the levels set by labor contracts agreed upon three or four years earlier. Delivery points continued to multiply (at a slower pace than in the past, but still by several hundred thousand annually). Transportation expenses were rising – like everyone else’s – as the price of fuel climbed. And the Postal Service’s infrastructure, whether for retail or mail processing operations, stayed in place, as did all of the agency’s expensive machinery, even as activity and volume slowed.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Congress did its own damage in 2006 when, fearing eventual postal insolvency would force taxpayers to cover the agency’s legacy costs, it mandated the Postal Service to set aside about $5.5 billion annually toward future retiree health costs. Ironically, despite the theoretical prudence of such a savings plan, implementing it as aggressively as it was, and at a time when the agency was rapidly becoming unable to afford it, seems to have been the catalyst for the very financial collapse that the provision’s authors feared.
So, in the broadest sense, it would seem obvious that balance between income and expense needs to be regained if the Postal Service is to return to any form of long-term stability. But how to do that is the onset of disagreement and the point at which forward progress stops.
Adding it all up
Clearly there are many elements contributing to the Postal Service’s woes and many things that need to be done to remedy them. But, virtually every remedial measure is opposed by some constituency having influence among the legislators whose actions (or inactions) make all the difference.
And, in a venue where influence is measured in dollars and votes, the arguments of parties lacking such commodities are often ignored. Whether the Postal Service, mailing industry groups, or individual companies from the industry, all lack the currency of the political arena and legislators know this. As much as they may understand USPS or industry perspectives, the bottom line for politicians is their own re-election, something that can be assisted much more by the votes and campaign dollars of the postal unions and other political allies than by the pleadings of postal or industry executives.
This isn’t to say there isn’t a handful of legislators who care about the Postal Service and who’ve become truly knowledgeable about it and the industry. The few earnest efforts at reform have come from them, and anything that might ever be produced in the future likely will, too. But they’re not above the realities of Congressional politics or of the re-election process.
So, when push comes to shove, they, too, will sense the point at which “doing the right thing” for the Postal Service would cost a higher political price than they’re willing to pay. That’s the way it’s been, why the postal mess continues, and why it may not be fixed any time soon.
(This commentary, along with further analysis of how to save the USPS, post office closings, the "exigency" case, and more, available in Postal Points, Issue 12-02.