Perhaps the worst of it is that the assault on the USPS did not start with Trump and Dejoy.
The GOP has been trying to hobble and marginalize the Postal Service for years, if not decades.
The following is just a small sample of how Republicans and other conservatives have been deliberately trying to undermine the Postal Service.
Listening to Issa, you’d never know that the post office’s immediate crisis is largely of Congress’s own making. Conservatives aren’t wrong to say that the shift toward electronic mail – what USPS calls “e-diversion” – poses a challenge for the Postal Service’s business model. (The recent drop-off in mail is also a consequence of the recession-induced drop in advertising.)
But even so, in the first quarter of this fiscal year, the post office would have made an operational profit, if not for a 75-year healthcare “pre-funding” mandate that applies to no other public or private institution in the United States.
Warren Gunnels, aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders, calls that mandate “the poison pill that has hammered the Postal Service … over 80 percent of the Postal Service deficit since that was enacted was entirely due to the pre-funding requirement.”
This death hug was part of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which was passed on a voice vote by a lame duck Republican Congress in 2006. As I’ve reported, the mandate required the Postal Service, over 10 years, to pre-fund healthcare benefits for the next 75. This unique burden costs USPS $5.5 billion a year. The new law also restricted the Postal Service’s ability to raise postage rates, or to provide “nonpostal services” that, in an e-diversion era, could be key to its future. American Postal Workers Union president Cliff Guffey says the bill was designed “by those people who hate government … to destroy the Postal Service. And that’s what they did.”
The Postal Service has long been required to provide “universal service”: delivering to all 151 million addresses in the United States. Conservatives promise that private companies could serve the Postal Service’s function more efficiently, but when it’s their money on the line, the private companies themselves aren’t always so sure. Some of the packages sent through UPS or FedEx are actually delivered by the Postal Service, because those companies save money by contracting with USPS to serve more remote customers.
The paragraphs I highlighted in the above excerpt are especially egregious. What public or private enterprise could expect to make a profit with a burdensome mandate like that imposed upon them by force of law?
Why are any conservatives, particularly Republicans, so hell bent on handicapping or preventing the USPS from providing the service so many Americans depend on every day, despite it's being enshrined in our very Constitution?
Do you suppose that the fact that Louis DeJoy is heavily invested in commercial delivery services that compete with the USPS, and has contributed millions to support Trump's candidacy might just barely have something to do with that?