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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In an example of what’s-old-is-new-again, the Postal Service announced on December 17 that it will be taking bids from shippers who want the agency to provide last-mile delivery. Details of the program will be disclosed “in the coming months,” with winning bidders being selected “in the second calendar quarter” of 2026 and service beginning the quarter after that, i.e., in…
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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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On November 24, the Postal Service published Postmarks and Postal Possession, its final rule about postmarks and their meaning. While the document seeks to clarify that postmarks don’t mean what many Americans might think, it’s fifty years too late in doing so. Moreover, given its association with the Regional Transportation Initiative, it contaminates a simple statement with other more subjective…
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Although there’s no transcript of a conversation, later events suggest that, at some point early in his tenure, former postmaster general Louis DeJoy asked why there were uniformed police circulating around USPS HQ. Many companies have security guards, usually sourced from any of a variety of private companies, so it might have seemed curious to DeJoy that the Postal Service…
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Sometimes it’s hard to get a straight answer. One such occasion was at the recent meeting of the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee. In a session that included a presentation about USPS service performance, the presenter showed charts (like the one above) that, among other data, compared service in late September 2025 to what it was a year earlier. After looking…
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The Postal Service’s attitude toward the Postal Regulatory Commission became more confrontational and dismissive under the tenure of former postmaster general Louis DeJoy, and apparently continues to be so even now that he’s gone. Background Docket SS2022-1, Special Study on Issues Related to Flats Operations, was opened on July 14, 2022, to fulfill a requirement of the Postal Service Reform…
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Deep in an appropriations bill passed by the 52nd Congress on March 3, 1893, was the clause “For free-delivery service, including existing experimental free-delivery offices, eleven million two hundred and fifty-four thousand nine hundred dollars, of which the sum of ten thousand dollars shall be applied under the direction of the Postmaster-General to experimental free-delivery in rural communities other than…
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