Opinion | The One Crucial Thing Congress Is Missing With Its Postal Reform

Bipartisan legislation to shrink USPS budget deficits avoids the hard questions about its future.

The Senate is set to pass legislation as soon as today to bolster the U.S. Postal Service’s flagging finances. The measure was supported by Democrats and Republicans and will then head to President Joe Biden’s desk, having already cleared the House in February.

Securing any bipartisan agreement in this town is a rare event, worthy of some celebration. But as someone who has watched the debate over the Postal Service for nearly 20 years, this one feels rather hollow.

The legislation will not change the Post Office in any way readily observable to the public. Uniformed letter carriers will continue to bring mail and boxes to American homes and post office boxes six days per week. Post offices will remain the drab retail outlets, and the plagues of mail theft and slipshod delivery performance presumably will continue.

The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 is non-reform reform.

Mostly, the legislation will reduce the agency’s deficits, which have been in the billions for many years. The bill achieves this objective by relieving the USPS of $100 billion of compensation costs. Postal workers, to be clear, are not taking a haircut. Instead, USPS’ healthcare costs will be reduced by shunting them into a new, less expensive health plan and by enrolling more postal workers into Medicare upon retirement. The bill also abolishes the mandate that the Post Office prefund its retirees’ health care costs, which adds red ink to USPS balance sheets but did build a $40 billion nest egg for retirees.

The rest of the legislation deals with various administrative matters, such as altering the way the Postal Regulatory Commission submits its budget and requiring a study on the Post Office’s processing of oversized envelopes.

Ultimately, the bill fails to address two basic questions: What does America need from a post office in the 21st century, and how should we pay for it?

Former President Richard Nixon signed the law to create the present day USPS in 1970. It was a huge evolutionary shift to meet the challenges of the day. Mail volume was rising, but postal costs were out of control and its performance was often terrible. So Congress transformed the dowdy Post Office Department into an independent agency of the executive branch, a self-funding government corporation that would be free to direct its operations free from politicians’ meddling. Its basic function was “to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people.”

For the most part, the agency did that competently. It survived competition from the facsimile and low cost national calling, which provided more immediate ways for individuals to communicate with one another. Rising revenues from burgeoning mail volume meant the Postal Service could cover the costs of delivering to more and more homes, the high expenses of its unionized workforce, and all sorts of subsidies, like reduced postage for not-for-profit organizations.

But the internet changed everything. Mail volume peaked in 2006, and subsequently has cratered 40 percent. Most mail today is advertisements, aka junk mail. Very little of it is person-to-person correspondence.

Meanwhile, e-commerce has flooded the Post Office with parcels. The revenues they bring have been a blessing, but they come with huge costs. The USPS’ delivery network was mostly designed to carry paper, from the mail collection boxes to the sortation machines to the mail carriers’ trucks and delivery bags. The agency is spending billions to retool itself to handle parcels, but also frets that parcel volume could taper or plunge should Amazon or other big shippers choose another deliverer.

It is a tough situation, one that requires Congress to come together and think big about the future of the USPS. How many days of paper mail delivery do we need? What parcels should the USPS deliver and which ones should be handled by the private sector? Should the USPS have a first responder role to deliver medication during a pandemic or biohazard attack? Should the agency’s employment policy continue to aim to provide middle class jobs? And should postage buyers, rather than taxpayers, continue to foot the bill for the Post Office?

Congress debated none of these issues. Instead, it triaged. Congress gave the agency $10 billion during the pandemic, and is now passing a non-reform reform bill that eases the agency’s financial crunch by shifting costs onto the public.

To be clear, getting any postal bill passed — beyond post office naming laws — is exceedingly difficult. Postal politics is inherently contentious, with unions, mailers and other interest groups battling for conflicting priorities. The Postal Service became even more of a lightning rod during the 2020 election and during the tenure of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who was maligned as a Trump minion who would steal the election and privatize the mails. That Democrats, Republicans, and DeJoy could find common ground is remarkable.

This is only the third reform bill to pass in half a century. Congress and the president can and will crow for enacting a bipartisan postal bill.

But make no mistake, they did so by dodging the tough questions of what the Postal Service should be in the 21st century. One day the country will need to have the discussion, and hopefully Congress will start it long before the next Postal Service crack-up ensues.