To fix government, the Postal Service is a good place to start

One of the few places where Donald Trump’s disruptive instincts might do some good.

December 18, 2024

Packages sit in a bin as the U.S. Postal Service prepares them for delivery. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

President-elect is considering overhauling the U.S. Postal Service, and already pursued it at least partially.

To be clear, we are agnostic on privatization for the United States. But with the Postal Service losing , and headed for $80 billion more in

losses over the next decade (despite from Congress in 2022), this is no time to think incrementally, much less to impose taboos. Indeed, postal reform is one issue on which Mr. Trump’s disruptive instincts might serve the public interest.

No doubt current arrangements favor certain entrenched interests with influence in ic opinion, and they are cranking up old narratives about how this popular institution knits together a far-flung nation.

Actually, what the Postal Service does is move physical objects, primarily paper documents, from one place to another place. The Postal Service spent $89.5 billion last year, more than three-quarters of which went to personnel costs. The Postal Service has 600,000-plus workers and operates a quarter-million vehicles. Yet demand for its core paper-moving service keeps dwindling — for the obvious reason that modern life is digital.

In 2023, people sent cards, bill payments and letters through the U.S. mail, down from in 2014. By admittedly imprecise contrast, there were every two days in 2021, the most recent year for which data exist. Delivery of what the Postal Service calls “market dominant” mail — items, such as first-class letters or marketing material, over which the Postal Service enjoys legal monopoly power — accounts for 53 percent of the agency’s revenue. Yet market dominant mail volume in 2023 was down almost 50 percent from 2008, according to by the agency’s inspector general.

“The factors driving mail volume trends represent a significant and irreversible change in the way our society communicates,” the report noted. In fact, the Postal Service handled 43 percent per capita in 2023 than it did in 1971, the year it was founded as a successor to the Post Office Department.

It is no coincidence that annual mail volume peaked at 213 billion pieces of all kinds in 2006 — the year before Apple rolled out the first iPhone. And in 2008, the Great Recession hit. (The Postal Service carried just .) Some suggest helping beer and wine delivery or banking. This could not offset lost mail volume but would create inappropriate government-backed competition with the private sector.

It bears emphasis that just over half of the Postal Service’s shrinking market dominant volume consists of marketing mail, also known as advertising, also known as junk mail. Of course, the Postal Service delivers these solicitations on behalf of tax-deductible charities and for-profit businesses — at preferential rates — whether customers want them or not. Recycling junk mail has turned into an expensive .

Even the government is taking its business elsewhere: Some fear that privatizing or otherwise rightsizing the Postal Service would affect Social Security checks for seniors. In fact, 99.4 percent of recipients use electronic direct deposit, according to the Of 67.8 million beneficiaries, just 437,000 receive paper checks. It’s fewer each day: In 2013, the Obama administration required all new Social Security recipients to sign up for electronic payment.

The IRS long ago offered electronic and payments; fewer and fewer billing transactions between banks and utilities and their customers move by mail.

Yes, people depend on the mail for prescriptions, but not nearly as many as doomsayers about postal reform imply. have gotten underwrite it, however, is not obvious.

The agency under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy In addition to relentlessly declining mail volume, however, union contract rules and regulatory constraints have made this task a Sisyphean one. More sustainable solutions must be found, because even if the Postal Service, in its current incarnation, cannot survive a digital world, mail is still a necessary part of the communication mix. Collecting and delivering ballots is one vital purpose the agency is still uniquely suited to fulfill. With or without privatization, the risk for the U.S. Postal Service is not radical reform; it’s reform that’s not radical enough.