Part of the plan includes a transition to a model "that delivers mail fewer days per week and to more central locations (not door delivery) [which] would operate at substantially lower costs."
The plan notes "USPS already has over $100 billion in unfunded liabilities, a substantial capital investment backlog, has posted losses for over a decade, and has no clear path to profitability without reform."
Except the primary reason the USPS has posted losses for over a decade is that, in 2006, Congress passed a law requiring the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits (supported by both sides of the aisle I should add) unlike any other Government agency or private industry competitor.
It really isn't hard to understand, the USPS is not playing by a fair set of rules and is losing as a result.
But the administration said they wouldn't sign anything that included emergency funding for the USPS. That doesn't prove what the administration's motives are, but they certainly seem hostile towards the USPS.
Simply put, the use of the Postal Service has dropped a lot but the number of employees retired or eligible to retire has not. In other words, they have so many eligible for full benefit retirements that they were not even trying to service the debt and instead likely to end up defaulting it to the PBGC which would have gutted payments and left retirees in a lurch.
So what would you have?
[0]https://www.cnbc.com/id/45018432
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2019/05/13/why-aoc-is-mo...
In the more rural parts, mail is very important. Cutting it down to 1/week is terrible.
It seems the exceedingly sensible thing to do would simply be for the government to subsidize delivery to the costliest areas. Unfortunately that would mean taxpayer dollars supporting the USPS and that's an idea that's seemingly untenable to rural communities.
Hopefully a solution can be found in all of this. I certainly can't see one, but I'm hopeful that it'll find a way.
According to the Post Office they aren't delivering packages for next to nothing. They are delivering them for competitive rates and if they increased them they would lose business, revenue, and profit.
Now this could be temporarily different due to COVID-19, but if that's the case then emergency funding would be appropriate.
And to add insult to an injury, the mandatory service such as first class mail is priced below competitive and cemented that way by law. It's as though certain people in US Congress want the USPS to be insolvent, and ultimately nationalized / tax funded.
The USPS needs to be preserved, it's essential. The stimulus wasn't the place to do it.
Why would anyone go on record to say they're going to let a key infrastructure service fail? No one would do that. We can only speculate on what their intentions are, but it's reasonable to say a lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence they won't let it fail.
The USPS is a target for a variety of reasons. Think of it as a leveraged buyout target... they have a ton of assets, from information assets to real estate. Carving up the real estate alone would make for a ton of patronage. There are also some extreme positions (which have prominence these days in some circles) that the post office and civil service is a manifestation of big, Federal government exerting too much influence over local affairs.