My heart sang today when I heard the news that President Biden had moved to replace two Postal Service board members, including the current Chair, in order to force a vote to remove Trumpaholic Postmaster General Louis DeToy from his post. A congressman noted tonight on MSNBC that Biden was moving to Remove DeJoy from Christmas.
But just getting rid of DeJoy won’t solve the problems in the postal service. The USPS is the only government enshrined in the US Constitution, and it has a long and proud tradition. Some people don’t know that the USPS is the only department of the US government that doesn’t draw a single penny from the federal budget. The USPS is self sustaining from the rates it charges for its services, and in past years, when the USPS made a profit, it didn’t jeep it, it was turned over to the Treasury Department.
The problems for the USPS started in 2006, with the Bush era passage of the Postal Service Accountability Act. It was a craven GOP attempt to drive the USPS broke, so that private industries, mostly GOP donors, could swoop in and privatize mail delivery for profit in the United states. Read UPS, FedEx, and DHL the killer clause of the act was that the USPS didn’t just have to fully find the retirement benefits for current postal service employees, it had to advance fund retirement benefits for people who weren’t even hired yet! This one step had the catastrophic effect of making the USPS almost instantly unsustainable. The USPS pension fund is now basically funded to support our children’s grandchildren, if they work for the USPS. It is insane.
Step one. Revoke the pension oversubscription clause of the 2006 Postal Accountability Act. Shit! I worked for United Airlines for 20 years, and when they went belly up in bankruptcy, we all lost our shirts from the fact that they had failed to meet their pension account responsibilities. I personally took a 48% haircut in my pension when it was turned over to the PBHC in bankruptcy. The USPS pension plan is ridiculously oversubscribed, and every day it goes on, it chokes the profitability of the USPS.
Step two. Certify the USPS under the FSLIC, the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, or under the Credit Union Act as a small financial institution. The Postal Service has not only post offices, but postal substations all over the country. They are in both urban as well as rural areas, places where residents can often have difficulty in passing the requirements for Checking and savings accounts from major banks.
Empower the USPS to open and maintain simple savings and checking accounts, including debit cards. They can also be authorized to make small personal loans for qualified candidates. This would be a godsend for millions of lower class Americans who are busy being raped by check cashing vultures because they can’t get a checking account for direct deposit for their paychecks. This one simple step would also help them to build a positive credit rating to lift them up to the next level.
There is nothing wrong with the USPS that can’t be fixed. Removing the onerous pension restrictions of the 2006b Act would instantly make the USPS profitable again. Allowing the USPS to act as a credit union would not only open a new level of profitability, which would go back to the Treasury, but would give a leg up to millions of citizens who could use a leg up. Do we have the stones to do it?
Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35
The other day, my husband asked me what I want for Christmas. I said ‘Dejoy out of the Post Office”. I pray to God, your ideas are implemented.
Love your Christmas list, Cherl! Can we add perp-walking Donald J. tRump into a federal penitentiary to that list?
PLEASE, GOD, YES!!!
“the killer clause of the act was that the USPS didn’t just have to fully find the retirement benefits for current postal service employees, it had to advance fund retirement benefits for people who weren’t even hired yet!”
Murf, you understated the case. It wasn’t merely “people who weren’t even hired yet,” it was effectively to cover people who weren’t even BORN yet. The bill was intended to prefund for AT LEAST the next 50 years (from 2006, so we’re talking to at least 2056).
I’m all for getting DeJoy out. He had no business being there in the first place. And I agree with fixing the pension part of it. But considering how long it can take to do business at the PO now, just buying stamps or sending parcels, do we really need to further congest the PO lobby by adding unassociated businesses to it? Turning the USPS into banking entity seems like a reach. What next? Have them sell insurance, investments? Maybe coffee, baked goods, or dental services? I just want to get our PO back online, get deliveries back on time, replace the scrapped equipment, and maybe add back more blue boxes to our neighborhoods.
Carol, I agree we need to bring back the regular postal services. However, adding a few additional services (at different counters) for banking services. I do think that you’re overthinking the
“added” services part though. Check cashing businesses rip-off the poor with extremely high rates for small amounts of money, not unlike the personal loans that compound interest on interest…this is a major issue in a lot of urban areas. It is not about adding a “mall’s worth” of services in the long run.
Recently retired USPS attorney here: I couldn’t agree more. Especially on banking. I was shocked to learn recently that 60% of African-Americans in the South do not have banking accounts. This is no doubt due in large part to a well-earned mistrust of government going all the way back to the failed Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Savings Bank after the Civil War, when former slaves lost 40% or more of their deposits owing to speculative investing by the bank and no federal regulation, backing or insurance. (Long story short, Lincoln started the Bureau for former slaves. But after his assassination, Andrew Johnson basically gutted it.)
But almost everyone loves and trusts the USPS. Year after year it is given the highest marks among federal agencies in survey after survey. If we build the banks into the Post Offices, they will come. And as Murf points out, that will take a big bite out of predatory same-day loan and check-cashing services.
Naturally, there are many more problems at the USPS than just the retirement funding. For example, although we Dems mostly support unions, our USPS unions are grievance-crazy, filing almost non-stop (mostly APWU and NALC), on even the most minor things. In fact, employees are allowed to file both a grievance and EEO (discrimination) claim on the same issue – at almost every other agency you have to choose one or the other, and the unions tell people to do this as leverage for their claims. Thus roughly 20,000 EEO claims are filed each year (it’s free – why not file?), although a large number are merley grievances with no relation to discrimination at all.
This eats into management time in a very real way, taking away substantial resources from operations and spending them instead on endless bickering, drawn out grievance paperwork, EEO mediations, and arbitrations. The costs are astronomical. Even worse, this drives a very real wedge between management and labor, which erodes productivity and morale. It’s a complex problem, as are so many other operational matters. But a better leader at the top, as opposed to Almond DeJoy, would be an excellent first step.
The one agency almost everyone in the country, and out of it, can agree has worked very well and the ‘pubes put everything they could into destroying it. And still failed.
Can we please make DeJoyless pay to replace all those efficient mail-sorting machines he destroyed and to re-install the mailboxes he removed?
Yes, please!
When DeJoy took over the USPS in 2020, I was thinking since he brought back the pony express for the postal service, I wanted the law to bring back tar and feathering for him destroying the postal machines. Make him replace them with his own money.