The Postal Service is now in the target’s eye of DOGE – the government’s new effort to reduce the size of government. The poor, beleaguered, post office. If ever an agency needed a diuretic of huge proportions, it is America’s Postal Service.
Last year, despite raising the cost of mailing a first class letter to $.73, the U.S. Postal Service lost a whopping $9.5 billion…$3 billion more than the previous year. That’s called progress. Now, I’m not saying the way we get our mail is inefficient…on the other hand, I think that’s exactly what I’m saying.
Mail service peaked in 2000, delivering more than two billion pieces of mail. Not bad from its humble beginning in 1776 when it was established by the 2d Continental Congress. By 1800 regular service was still nonexistent in many parts of our expanding, rambling country. It cost only 3c to deliver a letter and the service was using stagecoaches, steamboats, and railroads to make sure your letter arrived …eventually. Their unofficial motto: ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.’ That’s a lot of ‘neithers’ and ‘nors’ but for nearly two centuries they succeeded.
Since the advent of electronic mail and the Internet, however, postal volume has continued to decline as those bills, love letters, wedding invitations, birthday cards, and thank you notes, missives that kept us in touch, no longer traveled from front door to front door, but rather, electronically. Magazine deliveries declined as computer, telephone and television screens replaced reading. Even junk mail declined as advertisers found alternate paths to hawk their products.
In 2007, the Postal Service employed 784,000 workers working out of 32,000 locations. In 2023 there were still 525,000 and the number of locations increased to 33,600. Go figure that out! Recently they announced the termination of 10,000 postal workers. That’s less than a 2% reduction, hardly more than a pittance.
In essence the amount of product delivered halved in 16 years yet even with the advent of high-speed sorters and new technologies, employment only decreased by 1/3. The difference is an excess employment of more than 100,000 workers while the cost of mailing a 1st class letter increased 80% from $.41.
Part of the employment issue is the strength of the Postal Union that has resisted change for decades. They have resisted numerous suggestions, including ceasing Saturday delivery, increasing the cost of ‘junk’ mail, etc.
We are in an era of daily, often immediate, deliveries from Amazon, Costco, UPS and FedEx. More and more our mail delivery is an afterthought.
So, Elon, while you’re slashing nuclear watchdog employment, air traffic employment, independent Inspector General employment, and drinking the MAGA Kool-Aid, take a breath and check out the Postal Service…reductions are easier than driving a Tesla!