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BY ANNIE NORMAN

Last spring, at a Rural Democracy Initiative convening in Omaha, a room of over one hundred rural policy experts and elected officials from the hollers of Appalachia to the expansive mountains of Big Sky Country were all big beaming smiles and enthusiastically raised hands when asked “who here knows their postal worker by name?” The relationships that people have with their postal workers are the most universal, direct, consistent, person-to-person contact that most people will ever have with government service providers. So it’s no surprise that the post office is our most treasured public institution, second only to the National Park Service.

Families across the country count on USPS, and for people like us who are from rural areas, the Postal Service is a lifeline. I grew up on a farm in rural Oklahoma. At home, the color of the mail Jeep mail may change across time, but the red dirt that covers them is the same, and the familiarity and reliability of the service. My co-author, Shawn, grew up in Iowa where the postal service was a lifeline to information, magazines, and contact with friends and family. USPS offers more than just nostalgia. Seniors, veterans, and others with limited mobility and disabilities rely on the post office for medications and benefits; small family farmers rely on the post office to deliver live chickens and bees for their hives, and hundreds of Indigenous communities across this country are primarily in rural areas. Small business owners rely on the postal service to ship goods to their customers because in addition to affordability, there is a physical location in most ZIP codes they can ship from. Increasingly, rural places are losing their hospitals and pharmacies, making prescriptions through the mail more essential. But private carriers like UPS and FedEx charge extra to deliver to some rural areas, if they deliver there at all. 

The Postal Service’s universal service obligation is the nation’s promise to provide service to every family, in every ZIP code, in an affordable and timely manner. These are the kinds of vital connections our founding fathers intended to support when they created the Postal Service nearly 250 years ago. To help bind this vast nation, USPS today provides service at uniform, reasonable rates to all 157 million U.S. addresses, no matter how remote. Because of their vast network, the Postal Service usually handles the “last mile” of rural deliveries for private companies like UPS, Fedex, and Amazon. 

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy cannot be allowed to slow delivery service standards a second time for anyone, much less throw rural families under the bus to save a buck. On September 5, USPS senior management officials held a virtual conference for stakeholder feedback (notably, on Zoom, at 1 p.m. in the middle of the workday). USPS officials showed a graphic that illustrates the extreme urban bias and actual impact of these proposed changes on the nation’s postal delivery network. 

Everything in blue will move slower so everything in yellow can move faster–and yet officials said this plan is not targeted at rural America. That dog just don’t hunt, as the saying goes. The insulting nature of this proposal being pitched to the public as an acceptable trade off aside, are we to trust DeJoy when he says “At the end of the day, I think some portion of the mail showing up 12 hours later, I think it’s a price that had to be paid for letting this place be neglected”? So far, the roll out of his 10-year plan’s network consolidation has run into “major obstacles,” and DeJoy has faced wide and bipartisan criticism for his management of the transformation. It hasn’t been a matter of 12 hours; mail has been days and even weeks delayed. Atlanta, one of the first regions in the plan for a new processing center, saw a 64%-drop in on-time mail delivery. Performance has been so bad that Congress successfully pressured DeJoy to a pause of further major consolidations until after the 2024 election because local election officials started sounding the alarm about mail in ballots arriving in time. 

The majority of people across the country, including the members of The Save the Post Office Coalition, do not want to see any further mail slow downs. APWU President Mark Dimondstein said, “Management is already failing to meet the current first-class mail service standards even after lowering delivery targets in 2021. Rather than fix the service delays and problems, these new management proposals are to simply ‘move the goalposts.’”

The bottom line is that DeJoy can’t cut service and raise prices to get USPS out of debt. It will only cause people who can choose to stop using USPS, put rural people who have no other option in an impossible situation, and put USPS in a death spiral of bad service and market exodus. Instead of more mail slowdowns and higher prices, DeJoy and the postal board should focus on forward-thinking strategies to expand services and generate new sources of revenue. Among ordinary folks, saving the Postal Service is not a partisan issue. One poll showed that 90% of Republicans and 96% of Democrats support investments in the postal service.

Congress should pressure Postmaster General DeJoy and the USPS Board of Governors to reverse course, and instead of another mail slow down, reinstate the 2012 mail delivery service standards. They must not stray even one step away from USPS’s universal service obligation: to deliver the mail to everyone, in every ZIP code. USPS is a public service for all, and a lifeline for many, especially rural America. 

(Annie Norman is a first generation Oklahoman from rural Creek County, (Mvskoke-Creek Nation land), and she comes from a long line of Appalachian farmers. She works as the campaign manager for The Save the Post Office Coalition. )