Trump Is Undercutting Postal System Ahead of Voting: NEW YORK TIMES

[widgetc]

Mail Delays Fuel Concern Trump Is Undercutting Postal System Ahead of Voting

The president’s long campaign against the Postal Service is intersecting with his assault on mail-in voting amid concerns that he has politicized oversight of the agency.

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In recent weeks, at the direction of a Trump campaign megadonor who was recently named the postmaster general, the service has stopped paying mail carriers and clerks the overtime necessary to ensure that deliveries can be completed each day. That and other changes have led to reports of letters and packages being delayed by as many as several days.

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full article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/us/politics/trump-usps-mail-delays.html?action=click&module=Top%2...

[hlmacdon]

Politics aside, they just took out a 10 billion dollar bailout. The issue at the core here is the discounted contracts (NSA in USPS parlance) that USPS hands out to large accounts. There is a lack of transparency on said contracts and their financial viability is a source of debate. In the electronic postage world abuse of NSA contracts is fairly common and the profitability of the Amazon agreement is another contentious issue. 

[femmefan1946]

To say nothing of the long-running problem of the pension fund for which the USPS is required to hold ridiculous unused money theoretically to fund future pensions.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-04/congress-not-amazon-messed-up-the-u-s-postal-s...

"the most insane law" ever passed by Congress... requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees' health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make."

I purposely chose an older article about this ongoing vendetta against the USPS by the Republicans to show that it is not a new thing.

That bailout may not have been necessary if the prefunding were not in place. Canada Post by contrast with a similar delivery mandate, a smaller population, and a larger area to cover, actually pays its profits (most years) into the Canadian Treasury, although it has been struggling with the switch from letter and bill delivery to parcel delivery as its primary focus.