This column originally ran in the Times Record newspaper on August 24, 2020.
I have a deep, nerdy love for the Postal Service. I trace it back to my 20s, when I was working as an analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in Washington, DC. As part of my job, I was sent into the bowels of mail processing plants with a clipboard to audit the efficiency of their sorting and delivery operations. It was exactly as glamorous as it sounds.
The GAO issues about 1,000 reports and congressional testimonies a year, examining every conceivable government program and operation. While each report has a unique focus, the running joke inside the agency was that they could all have the same title: “Some Progress Made, More Needed.” I don’t know what it’s going to say on my gravestone, but I’ve often thought that sounded about right.
Our final report on postal efficiency was no exception. You may not be stunned to learn that the U.S. Postal Service could do things more efficiently. But more stunning to me by far was the scope of the challenges USPS faces. Every day, we ask them to process and deliver nearly half a billion pieces of mail, to literally every corner of the country, in every conceivable kind of weather…for 55 cents. The rise of the internet has reduced mail volume, but not the need to visit every mailbox daily. Add to that their enormous, congressionally-mandated financial obligations to retirees, tightened budgets, and increasingly unpredictable weather due to climate change and you’ve got yourself a doozy of a management challenge.
And yet, USPS soldiers on. It has always struck me as nothing short of miraculous that, for the price of a stamp, I could send a letter from Maine to my peripatetic friend Ryan, who spent a year training sled dogs in Bettles, Alaska, just inside the Arctic Circle. If Ryan had then gone to live with the Havasupai People at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I could still mail him a letter, which the Postal Service would deliver — this is true — on the back of a mule. Truly nothing will stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
Nothing, except perhaps determined sabotage by their own leadership. The news about sorting machine removals, sudden elimination of established overtime schedules, and blue curbside mailbox confiscations is incredibly disturbing, and certain to further undermine USPS’s ability to do what we’ve asked of them. The Postmaster General’s recent suggestion to Congress that he’ll pause these changes until after the election leaves many questions unanswered — including about the effects of the eviscerations that have already been carried out.
It’s easy to forget that the Postal Service is a service. It’s here because we as a nation have decided that staying connected is important; that we should be able to safely and reliably send a letter, a prescription, a ballot anywhere in America for a reasonable price. If you think the private sector could “solve this problem” in a way that doesn’t make it prohibitively expensive to send things to rural, harder-to-reach places, I have a truckload of blue mailboxes to sell you.
Especially on the eve of an election, we must protect the integrity of our mail. Congress needs to step up and ensure the damage to the USPS is undone, and we need to demand that they do so. Beyond that, we can all support this critical public service by buying stamps. I recently ordered a bunch through usps.com — the Maine Statehood stamps, the Gwen Ifill stamps, the 19th Amendment stamps, and the Enjoy the Great Outdoors stamps. Now I have something to put on my letters to Congress.
The Postal Service may not be perfect — like all of us, some progress has been made, more is needed — but it has always gotten the job done. Let’s make sure it can keep delivering for us.
Jeremy Cluchey lives in Bowdoinham.