As Election Day Nears, Harms of Austerity at USPS Are Clearer Than Ever

Oh poor, embattled Postal Service — your plight embodies the platitude, “We hurt the ones we love the most.”

Year after year, you’re trotted out as the country’s favorite federal agency. More than 70 percent of people sing your praises. Your fan club is so big, you even have your own merch collabs; your insignia has adorned hats and hoodies, from Forever 21 to Vans.

But love doesn’t keep the lights on. And, unfortunately, you’re still broke.

Last fiscal year, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) recorded $6.5 billion in losses — as in $6.5 billion more in losses than it had projected. As in the agency was planning on breaking even. Oops.

The blow was particularly crushing, because once upon a time, not that long ago, Democrats rallied around the cause of saving the USPS. A truly bipartisan bill took shape. “The Postal Service is fundamental to our economy, to our democracy, to our health and the very sense of who we are as a nation,” President Joe Biden said as he signed the Postal Service Reform Act into law on April 6, 2022.

Thanks to federal action, the USPS actually had a net income of $56 billion in fiscal year 2022. That’s because the law reversed a 2006 mandate that the USPS prefund its retiree health care benefits 75 years in advance — a requirement no other federal agency entity faces — and so the USPS was forgiven of more than $59 billion in defaulted payments. (Student loan forgiveness next, please?) After years of scraping by, light was finally on the horizon.

Of course, Congress didn’t step in until things began to look particularly dire. The USPS faced a high-profile crisis during the 2020 election cycle, after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy took office in May and quickly implemented a string of unpopular operational changes. In a matter of months, DeJoy eliminated overtime pay, reduced post office operating hours nationwide, removed hundreds of mail-sorting machines and public collection boxes, and banned postal workers from making extra trips to ensure on-time mail delivery. A Republican megadonor appointed by President Donald Trump, DeJoy was the first postmaster in 20 years without prior USPS experience. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that these cost-cutting attempts were ill-fated.

Mail began piling up, as post offices across the country grappled with weeklong backlogs. Prescription medication, Social Security checks, bills, and other important mail items were delayed in transit. As the election loomed, DeJoy told officials that state deadlines for casting mail-in ballots were “incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.” This was, of course, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, before vaccinations were widely available, and so a record number of voters were expected to cast their votes safely via mailbox, instead of trekking in person to the ballot box.

However, facing heavy criticism, lawsuits and an emergency congressional hearing, DeJoy paused his rollout of the reforms until after the election. Four years later, DeJoy once again is suspending cost-cutting efforts in the weeks leading up to the November election, telling reporters the USPS is implementing “extraordinary measures” to ensure all ballots are delivered on time.

In July, the USPS Office of Inspector General released its audit of the agency’s election mail readiness. The verdict: eh, not too bad, but should definitely be better.

I was heartened to read that political and election mail were processed on time about 97 to 98 percent of the time. But the report also noted that, at nearly half of the mail processing facilities evaluated, postal workers didn’t know election mail had to be postmarked — which some states require for a mail-in ballot to be counted. Additionally, 80 percent of mail processing facilities didn’t follow guidelines that require facilities to certify that all of their political and election mail has been sent out each day.

In September, the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors — each representing all 50 states — as well as the presidents of 29 local election official associations, sent a letter to DeJoy expressing their concerns about election mail service. The letter cited instances of election mail being marked as undeliverable at higher rates than usual, and officials demanded that DeJoy “take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service.”

But DeJoy, for his part, insists that everything is hunky dory. From the other side of the aisle, American Postal Workers Union (APWU) President Mark Dimondstein has also tried to allay voters’ concerns about post office performance, arguing that Trump has been sowing doubt about the USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in order to dissuade people from voting. Still, Dimondstein and the APWU have repeatedly raised concerns that the Postal Service is short-staffed. They’re doing their best, but they need more support.

In other words, the Postal Service is still in need of an overhaul. Even though the USPS is largely viewed as a public service, it’s expected to fund itself without public money — thanks in part to legislation enacted by none other than President Ronald Reagan, that vanguard of privatization. Since that revenue model hasn’t really worked, Congress has had to appropriate funds to help the USPS stay afloat in recent years — and now, as a result, simply sending and receiving mail is a divisive politicized issue.

Postal workers and advocates for USPS reform say that the 2022 law is a good start, but there are more measures that should be taken to safeguard the Postal Service’s financial future. One of these proposals is postal banking, or offering a public banking option at USPS locations. Nearly 10 million adults don’t have a bank account, which means they spend up to $2,400 on fees each year just to access their money. Postal banking would expand families’ access to an affordable banking option while generating revenue for the USPS.

The proposal is an obvious win-win — so, of course, it’s languishing. The Postal Service Reform Act rightly expanded the USPS’s ability to perform nonpostal services, and the USPS began rolling out a check-cashing pilot program. But a 2023 report from the Save the Post Office coalition raises red flags: The test run is only active in four locations, generally not in underserved communities that would benefit most from postal banking, and it limits cashable checks to a $500 max. “This pilot runs the risk of making the same mistakes as the existing financial services offered in post offices, which have failed to keep up with technological advances and have become inaccessible and more expensive due to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s extreme price hikes,” the report’s authors wrote.

Unfortunately, we’ll only know whether election mail is successfully delivered once Election Day is all said and done. But there’s at least one thing we know for certain: Regardless of whatever happens when all of the mail-in ballots are finally tallied, if the tallies don’t fall in his favor, Donald Trump is going to make a big stink.