America's conservatives want to kill off your post office. This is not exactly new news, but under Donald Trump's feckless and bumbling rule, they are coming closer than ever to doing it. Trump's new postmaster general, campaign donor rich-guy Louis DeJoy, is wasting no time making changes in the name of "efficiency." Coincidentally, efficiency means making service worse.
DeJoy's changes reach down into the day-to-day of how the U.S. Postal Service actually delivers mail, reports The Washington Post. DeJoy's new rules bar overtime, period, even if offices are short-staffed (due, say, to a pandemic). He also instructs that mail should henceforth be left in distribution centers for the next day if those centers "run late," rather than delaying letter carriers from leaving at their appointed times to conduct their routes. It sounds harmless enough, but extended nationwide, that small change has big implications for service.
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Some watchdog groups and elected officials, in fact, are pretty certain that the moves are indeed designed to sabotage Postal Service competitiveness and survival.
Most obviously, DeJoy’s biggest change means that during busier-than-normal times—or even just odd times—packages may start arriving a day late. While this may make the service more "efficient" in its scheduling, it also makes the Postal Service slightly less competitive against the package delivery services that compete with it—especially coupled with a potential rate hike in the coming year. It may be a small change, but making the Postal Service slightly less reliable and significantly more expensive than it was before will assuredly cause some number of customers to switch from it to private competitors. (The federal service is already at a disadvantage because it is required to deliver nationwide while its private competitors can and do simply ignore unprofitable, sparsely populated areas.)
A bigger current problem, however, is DeJoy's instruction to make this change at this precise moment in time. Despite the Trump administration getting bored with it and moving on to other things, we remain in the midst of a pandemic. Public gatherings are extremely dangerous during a pandemic, meaning that literally every place in America not governed by nihilistic imbeciles is encouraging voters to vote by mail. Those registration forms, sample ballots, and ballots will be going out, en masse, to post offices. Which, if they get too busy, are now instructed to just let each them sit for a day.
It's not that the move is explicitly designed to inconvenience state efforts to hold by-mail elections, of course. The new postmaster general would never be so petty. But it does seem a serendipitous coincidence.
Speaking of not being petty, the new chief also keeps every letter carrier in America from parking more than four times during their routes to walk between houses, because the practice is being "abused" and "taken advantage of" by mail carriers who ... um ... walk too much? Nope, no pettiness here. Just streamlined, ruthless, gas-guzzling efficiency. (By the end of a second term of a Trump administration, we can expect all post office trucks to "roll coal" for our freedoms.)
So no overtime (during a pandemic), no delaying routes to collect all of the day's mail before heading out, no route repeats to deliver late-arriving packages, and no walking to places you could drive to. The Trump-run post office will be taking the nation's most popular government service and making it worse and less reliable (during a freaking pandemic) in the name of an "efficiency" that the service did not adopt before because past leadership did not think the upsides outweighed the downsides.
Oh, boy.
