Across the street from the Wisconsin state capitol and a few doors down from the offices of The Progressive is a post office named in honor of the magazine’s founder, Robert La Follette. A sign in the window declares, “Heroes Work Here.” I believe that’s true. Not the swashbuckling or military kind, but people who do an honest job as best they can, despite impediments (“neither snow nor rain nor . . .”) and for the common good.
The signs went up at post offices across the country early last year, just as COVID-19 made postal workers both more necessary and more at risk. There’s no way to sort mail from home and, especially in the early days of the pandemic, hardly anyone else was going door-to-door.
“They came up with those signs to let people know that not just the nurses and the doctors and the medical staff are heroes,” says Paul McKenna, who until recently was president of the American Postal Workers Union for Milwaukee Area Local 3. “We’re just as essential as the grocery store workers and health care workers to keep the country open.”
U.S. Postal Service Postmaster General Louis DeJoy speaks during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on February 24, 2021.
I first interviewed McKenna on March 23, a few days after his thirtieth anniversary as a postal worker and about a week ahead of his retirement. He began his career as a postal clerk in Milwaukee and joined the union soon after. He was elected as the local’s president in 1997 and held that position afterward for all but four years. He worries about what he sees happening to the U.S. Postal Service.
“We are not performing at the level that we want to perform at as postal workers or at what the American people should expect,” McKenna says. “Mail is as slow now as I’ve ever seen, and it’s an embarrassment to say I worked for the post office because of the time it’s taking for a letter to go from one town to the next town over. It’s not good.”
March 23 was also the day U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled his ten-year plan for reorienting the Postal Service. It calls for price hikes and service reductions. The on-time delivery window for a first-class letter would go from three to five days. McKenna and others believe these moves are meant to further erode public confidence in the agency so it can be put on the chopping block of privatization.
“They are shortening hours at the post office, extending delivery times. That’s the last thing that they should be doing,” McKenna tells me. “We should be trying to increase the proficiency and get the mail from point A to point B faster, not slower.” He notes that the Postal Service enjoys overwhelming public support, more than any other federal agency. “We’ve been at the top for years and years. But if they keep degrading the service, we’re not going to be there anymore.”
DeJoy was appointed on May 6, 2020, by the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, led by an appointee of then-President Donald Trump. DeJoy’s name was added to a list of potential candidates a few weeks after Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, met privately with Republican appointees to the board.
David C. Williams, a former vice chair of the board, expressed concerns about Mnuchin’s role and DeJoy’s selection, and resigned. Williams later told lawmakers, “If this is the beginning of what the President promised, it’s the end of the Postal Service.”
DeJoy, a prominent donor to Trump and other Republicans, retains financial ties to a company that assists the Postal Service during busy periods. He and his wife have reported having between $30 million and $75 million in assets with Postal Service competitors or contractors. DeJoy is now under investigation by the FBI for possible past violations of campaign finance laws; he allegedly directed subordinates to make donations for which they were later reimbursed as a way to skirt contribution limits. DeJoy denies any wrongdoing.
President Joe Biden in February nominated three individuals to fill three empty seats on the Postal Service Board of Governors. All were asked about DeJoy at a April 28 Senate hearing and said they were noncommittal. Their appointments were affirmed on May 28 by the full Senate. [Editor’s note: This article has been updated from the print version to reflect the latest developments regarding the FBI probe and Biden’s board appointments.]
But even now that Democrat-appointed members make up the board majority, DeJoy’s departure is no sure thing. On the same day that Biden announced his board picks, DeJoy defiantly told lawmakers he expected to be around for a good, long time. “Get used to me,” he advised.
As even the American Postal Workers Union and National Association of Letter Carriers acknowledge, DeJoy’s ten-year plan contains many good ideas. It calls for an end to a 2006 mandate imposed by Congress on the Postal Service to prefund its employees’ health retirement benefits well into the future, something no other public entity—“or private, for that matter,” McKenna tells me when I bring it up—is expected to do. And DeJoy has pledged to preserve six-day-a-week delivery, which President Barack Obama repeatedly pushed to end.
The Postal Service’s problems run deep and will remain present even if DeJoy does not. As Kimberly Frum, a spokesperson for the Postal Service, puts it in an email to The Progressive: “Our business and operating models are unsustainable and out of step with the changing needs of the nation and our customers. Years of chronic underinvestment in our infrastructure and network have taken its toll on our performance and workforce. Our problems are serious but solvable.”
She’s right: All of the Postal Service’s problems can be fixed. Relative to, say, managing a pandemic that a huge share of the population refuses to take seriously, it should be a cinch.
The post office was established in July 1775, a full year before the Declaration of Independence. It’s enshrined in the Constitution. It was officially reconstituted as the U.S. Postal Service, an independent executive branch agency, in 1971. It is self-financing and receives no taxpayer dollars.
Today the Postal Service employs more than 644,000 people, the vast majority of whom are represented by unions. Demographics from 2015–2019 show that some 23 percent of the agency’s workers are Black, compared to less than 12 percent for the private sector, and nearly 15 percent are veterans, compared to just over 5 percent in the private sector.
“Postal workers look like America, but with a higher proportion of Black workers and veterans,” writes Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, in an enlightening report titled “The War Against the Postal Service” released this past December. It notes that postal work pays better than private sector jobs that do not require a college degree. Only 9 percent of postal workers make less than $15 an hour, compared to more than 28 percent in the private sector overall.
The pay and working conditions of Postal Service employees improved dramatically after postal workers in March 1970 staged the largest wildcat strike in U.S. history, involving more than 200,000 workers in thirteen states. It erupted after members of Congress dragged their feet on passing a 5.4 percent wage hike for postal workers, less than the rate of inflation, a year after giving themselves a 41 percent pay boost.
President Richard Nixon, declaring “we have the means to deliver the mail,” called in the National Guard and U.S. Armed Forces personnel to replace the striking workers. But they lacked the training to do these jobs and after eight days the government gave in, giving the workers a 6 percent raise followed by another 8 percent hike later that year. The strikers also won the right to engage in collective bargaining, after years of having to come directly to Congress hat-in-hand, a process they dubbed “collective begging.”
Morrissey’s report concludes that, all things considered, the modern Postal Service is “a model of efficiency and responsive to changing customer needs. But the conflicting demands made upon it by Congress and regulators put it in a precarious financial position even before the pandemic.” Plus it must contend with “anti-government ideologues and special interests [that] have long sought to privatize, shrink, or hobble the Postal Service.”
Such negative trends were exacerbated by Trump, who sought to use the Postal Service to wage a personal vendetta against Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. In early April 2020, Trump falsely asserted that the Postal Service loses money “every time they deliver a package for Amazon or these other Internet companies.” On April 24, he threatened to block a $10 billion emergency loan to the agency unless it quadrupled shipping rates for online retailers including Amazon.
“The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
Much of the Postal Service’s financial woes trace to the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which tied postage increases to the rate of inflation, limited the agency’s ability to branch into new areas, and strictly limited its ability to borrow. Most significantly, it required the Postal Service to annually set aside $5.5 billion to cover postal workers’ future retiree health benefits.
In anticipation of a mail slowdown during the 2020 presidential election, the U.S. Postal Service sent out postcards urging people to plan ahead.
“Congress has kind of used the post office as a cash cow for a long, long time, and they would take whatever surpluses there were to help balance the budget,” says Keith Steffen, a former letter carrier who now serves as director of retirees for the Wisconsin State Association of Letter Carriers and edits the local branch’s newsletter. “And this law in 2006 was a way to do that. I mean, they were taking basically five-and-a-half-billion dollars a year and putting it into what was supposed to be the retirement fund.”
Were it not for this mandate, found a 2019 report by the Institute for Policy Studies, the Postal Service “would have reported operating profits in each of the last six years.” Though these payments have stopped in recent years, the fund now contains about $50 billion that could go to cut deficits and invest in the agency’s future.
“That money could be used for things like getting new vehicles, which are at this point beyond old, or for mail-processing machines, or any number of other things that the Postal Service can use to improve service to the American people,” says Steffen, speaking for himself and not the Postal Service or the letter carriers union.
With more people sending messages and paying bills via the Internet, there are fewer letters to deliver. According to the Postal Service, the number of mail pieces handled fell from 213 billion in 2006 to 129 billion last year. In response, the Postal Service has continued to reduce its ability to process mail.
“It didn’t start with DeJoy,” Steffen says. “They were closing processing centers probably for the last fifteen or twenty years, since the mail volume started dropping off.” Madison was once a postal hub with its own processing center; now this is done in Milwaukee. That means, Steffen confirms, that if I mail a letter to my next-door neighbor in Madison, it will go to a processing center in Milwaukee, seventy-five miles away, and then be sent back.
Retired postal worker Glenda Morris protests postal cutbacks on August 25, 2020, in New York City.
Meanwhile, the number of package deliveries has soared since the start of the pandemic, with the Postal Service delivering many of the packages moved cross-country by UPS and FedEx, as well as those from major online retailers including Amazon. The agency delivered nearly 2.2 billion packages in the final quarter of 2020, an all-time record, up from just over 1.7 billion for this period in 2019.
“People are working a lot of hours,” Steffen says. “When there are peak periods, like the Christmas season, it just becomes totally unmanageable. And then there’s the pandemic on top of that, with a lot of people being either ill or quarantined and not able to report for work.”
By the end of last September, a Postal Service financial report indicated, nearly 40,000 postal workers—deemed “essential” early in the pandemic—had contracted COVID-19, and 129 had died.
Soon after DeJoy became postmaster general, the Postal Service reassigned or displaced at least twenty-three senior postal executives; sought to restrict overtime pay; required states to send mail-in ballots by first-class mail, thus increasing election expenses; and removed mail-sorting machines from postal facilities.
DeJoy called for the decommissioning of 671 massive mail-sorting machines, about 10 percent of the total. His Postal Service removed more than 700 mail collection boxes from locations around the country. Both practices were halted when they came to light. (The Postal Service says there were 140,845 collection boxes in the United States last year, down from 156,349 in 2014.)
McKenna concedes that DeJoy “walked into a mess with the pandemic” but is now part of the problem. “He hasn’t done anything to increase our staffing to get the mail out.”
Trump spent much of the lead-up to the November 3 election attacking the use of mail-in ballots, despite his usual dearth of evidence that they lead to fraud. At one point, he openly admitted to holding up Postal Service funding to limit voting by mail, saying “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
Postal workers and the public responded with outrage, Congressional hearings were held, and a federal judge, in response to lawsuits filed by watchdog groups, ordered the Postal Service to roll back measures designed to slow the flow of election-related mail. Another federal judge later said he was “not pleased” with the Postal Service’s level of compliance.
In the end, said Allison Zieve, the director of litigation for Public Citizen, one of the watchdog groups that filed a suit, the Postal Service did “a good job” handing election mail. A March 2021 report issued by the Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General tallied that the agency successfully processed more than 134 million pieces of election mail, about 94 percent of the time in accordance with its service standards, which is better than for regular mail.
But the uncertainty generated over mail-in ballots did have harmful consequences. “It was a calculated attempt by Trump and the Republicans to scare people about the reliability of voting by mail—you know, that their vote wouldn’t be counted,” says Morrissey in an interview. Her own “very frail, very sick” elderly mother voted in person because she didn’t trust the mail.
In January, The Morning Call newspaper of Allentown, Pennsylvania, ran dozens of postal delivery horror stories from its readers. Here are a few: “I haven’t received a cell phone bill for two months. Still missing Christmas cards from family, too.” “I got my insurance bill six days after it was due!” “My meds by mail are being held up, and I’m missing some bills. Thank God I pay most online.” “My package from Allentown to Boston is in Kansas now. Been two weeks so we are hopeful it will find its way back east soon.”
One recently retired postal worker I spoke to, John Kieka, said a pension mailing he sent using two-day priority mail “took three weeks to get there.” McKenna says, “I’ve mailed stuff from here to the other part of my city and it’s taken three days.”
The writer Wendell Berry, who lives in rural Kentucky, tells me his mail is routinely delayed, and has been since long before the pandemic. One letter I sent him last year took a month to arrive. He has other examples of similar delays, going back several years.
A first-class letter Berry sent to his editor on September 24 of last year arrived on March 4, the same day as a “unique copy” of an edited interview sent by priority mail on October 9, nearly five months earlier. His editor emailed me a photo of these late arrivals, next to the March 4 edition of The New York Times, to prove the date, as is done with hostage photos. On April 2, Berry received a letter postmarked March 19; it had an “unable to forward” sticker even though it was correctly addressed.
“I have recently had priority mailings either lost or delayed for as much as ten days,” Berry writes. “And there are days where our mail is not delivered at all. Such things have never happened before in my lifetime.” Berry is eighty-six and working on a new book.
The delivery of periodicals has also been delayed. Jason Peters, the editor of a twice-yearly journal called Local Culture, says an issue last fall took six weeks to go from the printer in Grand Rapids to his home in Williamston, Michigan. His sister, who lives “just down the road,” got hers in two weeks.
The mail processing center about eleven miles away from Williamston closed in 2015, along with about eighty others across the nation. Mail to Peters now comes through Grand Rapids, about eighty miles away. Moreover, he says, “Our own little post office moved outside the city limits, so business owners in our one-stoplight downtown can no longer walk to it.”
Norman Stockwell, publisher of The Progressive, says the magazine has seen a slowdown in delivery, as well as longer send times for regular mail: “We’ve had situations where checks were sent and not received for several weeks.” And while delivery times have recently improved, he notes, “people are trusting the mail service less.”
DeJoy’s critics say that’s the whole point—to lower public confidence until, as McKenna puts it, “the American people don’t like the post office anymore and they can sell it off and some private entity can make some money.”
Spokesperson Frum insists that talk of DeJoy wanting to privatize the Postal Service is “not true.” While the agency’s problems are serious, she says, “We fully embrace our role as a vital part of the federal government and the nation’s critical infrastructure.”
But Morrissey says “there’s no doubt in my mind” that the end goal is privatization. She notes that DeJoy “talks about all these ways of saving money that are service cuts” without doing obvious things to raise income, like branching out into postal banking.
It’s not a new idea. U.S. post offices provided banking services from 1910, when Congress established the Postal Savings System, to 1967, when the practice was phased out. Post offices, which already offer money orders, could add financial services ranging from check cashing to savings accounts and small loans.
“Postal banking is a win-win solution: It can help the post office’s bottom line and serve millions of Americans that are currently underbanked and unbanked,” Rakim Brooks, senior campaign strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union, told NBC News. “People are using the mail less, and we think that the institution has to provide new services.”
But DeJoy’s ten-year plan is silent on postal banking, and the lending industry has opposed resuming postal banking, claiming it is “beyond the Postal Service’s core competencies.”
Even after Biden’s picks to the Postal Service Board of Governors are confirmed, DeJoy could still keep his job.
“The Postal Service,” says Morrissey, “was set up to be somewhat independent of political interference,” adding that DeJoy could “use the protections against political interference to stay on,” at least for a while. DeJoy clearly “doesn’t like the idea of being booted” and has tried to moderate his positions. “He’s actually been pretty careful to avoid the worst.”
In March, DeJoy told a Congressional committee that he was “a little embarrassed” by his often blustery behavior during such proceedings. “I apologize to you if I have offended you in some way.” He also said he would grade himself with an “A” for how he has performed his duties.
DeJoy’s ten-year “Delivering for America” plan would end the use of planes for first-class mail, which would lengthen delivery time significantly. It would also raise rates for mail and package deliveries, and reduce post office hours.
But while expressing “obvious concerns” over these service cuts, the National Association of Letter Carriers says the plan includes “many positive elements” to help the Postal Service grow in a changing environment. The American Postal Workers Union is similarly torn, saying the proposed cuts will have “a negative effect on postal workers and the public” but that “there are elements of this plan [we] will support.”
The plan, eight months in the making, does not require Congressional approval, although it could not reach its goals unless Congress repeals the requirement for advance health care funding for retired postal workers. Some parts of the plan require Postal Regulatory Commission approval or advisory opinions, which will include opportunities for public comment.
Retiree McKenna, who has remained active with the American Postal Workers Union, “would like to see the post office stay a viable public entity and the people still have the trust in our organization.” But he knows that won’t be easy. To survive, the agency must continue to earn the support of the public, against efforts to undermine it.
One of the responses to The Morning Call’s request for stories was from a Pennsylvania woman named Odessa Langlais, who wrote in part:
“You need people to process the mail and to deliver it. You need people to stock the shelves at grocery stores and run the registers. You need farmers to work the fields and truck drivers to deliver the food. We all need to be patient and say an extra prayer for the people that provide these services for us. They are doing the best that they can in really crazy situations. Be kind. Be grateful and be patient. Thank you, all essential workers.”