Will the Hollowed-Out Post Office Hand the Election to Trump?
A look at the question that's driving everyone I know crazy.
(Photo by the Air Force)
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Under duress, I will now write about the Post Office. This is one of those wearying, Trump-era news topics where the partisan bluster obscures the news value. A lot of people are going way overboard, and spreading falsehoods about this issue. All sorts of social media posts about locked mailboxes and demolished mail trucks are proliferating, but there’s very little substance to most of them.
And yet, maybe they’re not wrong to go overboard. The Postmaster General’s Senate testimony over Zoom on Friday certainly didn’t clarify anything.
The claim that some kind of conspiracy is afoot is substantive. Trump, rather insanely, said on August 13 that he opposes what appear to be two totally necessary, but Democrat-led aid measures for the post office, and added, “If they don't get those two items, that means you can't have universal mail-in voting because they're not equipped to have it."
It’s another Trump insta-scandal, and just like the rest, this one merits a far-reaching investigation. Someone should be held accountable. I would even go as far as to say the possible takeaways of this scandal are terrifying: Can the president simply use federal authority to attack the federal infrastructure that enables millions of votes to be counted, and thereby tip the election in his favor? I don’t know! But it’s totally plausible, and I wouldn’t put it past him.
And yet, come on, Jamie Lee Curtis, you’re better than this:
All you can do to evaluate an extreme claim like this is parse a demoralizing amount of data to try and divine a politician’s intentions. For instance, on August 15, amid all the justified and unjustified conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s management of the United States Postal Service, embattled Postmaster General Louis Dejoy explained himself, sort of, in a letter. He’d like people to “realistically consider how the mail works, and be mindful of our delivery standards, in order to provide voters ample time to cast ballots through the mail.”
Dejoy is a Trump donor with what appears to be a plausible conflict of interest as regards the fate of the Post Office—specifically, he made millions working in direct competition with it—but if you humor him, you get something with a whiff of truth: states expanding their vote-by-mail efforts might overrun their postal infrastructure. And yet, how could any sane person trust Dejoy as he shuts down postal equipment and decreases the efficiency of the Post Office. It stands to reason that if you do that, you can increase the number of ballots that don’t make it to their destinations. In key areas like Palm Beach Florida, it looks like more Democrats than Republicans will vote by mail this November. Less voting by mail could mean more Republican victories. That’s self-dealing! Authoritarian! Anti-democratic!
But DeJoy’s actual treachery, if there is any, remains to be seen. He inherited an organization plagued by seemingly deliberately-engineered funding problems going back almost two decades. In the early days of the Bush Administration, its ability to pay pensions became a bone of contention for conservative groups like The Heritage Foundation. A Republican-led piece of legislation from 2006 forced USPS to funnel much-needed funds into employee pensions that might have otherwise helped it remain financially solvent, and that same law made it impossible for the Post Office to make extra money selling office supplies or providing financial services. All of this sucks for the post office, but it’s not directly Dejoy’s fault, so when he claims he needs to slash the budget, he has an alibi at least: The Post Office is—according to conventional wisdom—FUBAR. Right?
I asked Rich Weissman, a supply chain commentator, and teacher at Northeastern College whether the Post Office is FUBAR, and he was relatively sanguine. “They absolutely own the last mile delivery anywhere in the country; process efficient at a reasonable cost. They do what for-profit carriers choose not to do, that is to make a delivery to essentially every address in the United States. And they are required to do so by law.”
Got it? The Post Office is ready to soar if we’ll just let it, except its ability to soar is arguably hampered by Congress. Here’s a clip of Bernie Sanders bemoaning the government’s bullying of the Post Office way back in 2013.
Are calls for DeJoy’s resignation justified? Maybe, but if so, it would be simply because the Post Office is being mismanaged. Like everyone, I’ve noticed this firsthand. My landlady (Hi Tamara) never got my rent check for July (well into Dejoy’s tenure), and I had to hand deliver a second one. The first one simply never arrived. That’s never happened before with mail in my experience. Everyone seems to have a story like this.
I’m also comfortable with the assumption that Dejoy is biased toward sabotaging the Post Office, but is he doing something that qualifies as sabotage in any legal sense? And if he is, is he conscious of it, and if he is conscious of it, can someone prove he’s conscious of it? Etc.. etc…
The more important question, I suppose, is can we actually expect ballots to somehow not be delivered? Probably not, Weissman said.
“The USPS processes over 450 million pieces of mail a day. Even a million ballots over a period of weeks shouldn’t be an issue.”
So there. Don’t sweat it. Ah, but he wasn’t done:
“…unless their operations are restricted in an effort to slow the mail for nefarious purposes.”
So I’m really sorry to do this to you, but: 🤷
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