In the waning days of the 119th Congress, as all members of the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate go home to assert that their legislative productivity warrants their re-election, it’s doubtful that much will be done to help the Postal Service resolve its business and financial woes. Members of Congress and their staffs (should) have been…
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The Postal Service’s quarterly financial and service performance numbers likely won’t be published until mid-December, but odds are they’ll be accompanied by carefully crafted pronouncements asserting that the 10-Year Plan is still working just fine. That there will be a significant financial loss – again – will be explained away as caused by uncontrollable factors that would be remedied if…
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The Executive Order issued last March 31 has placed the Postal Service in an exceptional no-win situation. Generally, the instructions in that order mandated that the agency perform certain functions, and establish and enforce related processes, to block ineligible individuals from voting by mail. The USPS was also told to produce mailing standards for the envelopes used to send and…
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Say what you will about former postmaster general Louis DeJoy’s accomplishments, but one thing he did was ensure his policies lived on after he was out of office. Even though DeJoy has been gone for over a year, his 10-Year Plan survives. Members of Congress, as well as most of the mailing community, have noted its wholesale failure to restore…
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After last week’s Congressional hearing, anyone reading the statements and hearing the comments by the Postal Regulatory Commission’s four commissioners has a thorough summary of the PRC’s perspectives about the Postal Service. Collectively, their observations about USPS finances, operations, and service were not positive, and generally traced the source of their concerns to the 10-Year Plan initiated five years ago…
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As an organization established to serve commercial mail producers, we’re sometimes asked why we’re concerned about the Postal Service’s Regional Transportation Optimization program, which primarily impacts retail customers. Our answer is simple: RTO violates the fundamental principle of universal service. By arbitrarily differentiating between those customers within a certain distance from a regional processing and distribution center and those farther…
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Watching PMG David Steiner testify before the House Subcommittee on Government Operations last week made some impressions, good and bad, and perpetuated concerns over conditions not being addressed. The hearing was in a large room with the subcommittee leadership sitting on the top row, above many other empty rows, looking at the witnesses some distance below. The more unusual element…
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The practice of regime change – one way or another – has gained a certain popularity of late. Usually the initial change is replacement of the person at the top, followed by a winnowing of those in subordinate positions until holdovers from the prior regime have left – one way or another. Fortunately, the US had an orderly process for…
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When Amazon announced last week that it was making plans to expand its delivery network into places served by the Postal Service’s rural routes, many postal observers rightly went UH-OH, knowing how impactful the associated loss of business would be on USPS finances. Though the possibility was always looming that Amazon could in-source more or all of the volume it…
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There’s an old expression to the effect that “If you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail.” In other words, people tend to view a problem, and approach its solution, in the context of their own experience. Applying this to the Postal Service, former postmaster general Louis DeJoy was a trucking guy, experienced in moving full trucks of boxes from…
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