What Is Next in Evolution of Postal Service?

However they feel about it, many people think the U.S. Postal Service is synonymous with the government. “We’re the daily federal presence in every hamlet in the country,” says Ann Robinson, the Postal Service’s consumer advocate in Washington. “There’s a very special bond between us and the public.”

Alas, the bond shows some fraying, particularly since the recent and heavily criticized cuts in counter hours and Sunday pickups. “Since 1970,” says Harry Lewis, attorney with Public Citizen, a public interest organization founded by Ralph Nader in Washington, “there’s been a de-emphasis on services to residential mailers and emphasis on service to business mailers.”

Actually, the Postal Service is only semi-governmental, an “independent federal agency” since 1970. It’s still “owned by the public, the citizens of the United States,” says Postal Service spokesman Ralph Stewart at Washington headquarters. But Congress doesn’t provide its whole budget or its management; the postmaster general, though selected by presidential appointees on the Postal Service’s board of governors, no longer is a Cabinet member, and the Postal Service is supposed to be a self-sufficient, if nonprofit business, “operating,” says Stewart, “on the revenue it brings in from services sold to the public.”

Some Competitors Do Better

Even so, until 1982, the Postal Service continued to get congressional “public service” subsidies to support such desired services as rural and Saturday deliveries, and it still gets $500 million a year to make up for the special rates that it gives nonprofit groups. Its plans and policies are reviewed by an Administration-appointed board of governors or Postal Rate Commission, and it’s subject to congressional authority.

While such attachments aren’t common knowledge, the post office’s problems are well known, including the service cuts (announced just before postal rates were raised). For 20 years, mail volume--now 154 billion pieces a year--has increased about 5% a year, accompanied by complaints about service, particularly delays in delivery, misdelivery, the rudeness of clerks and overly deliberate pace of service in some larger post offices.

What’s more, while the Postal Service moans about the impossible task of delivering the nation’s mail, the public sees how much better some competitors do tasks over which the Postal Service has no monopoly. With notable efficiency, United Parcel Service now dominates fourth-class mail, or packages. When the Postal Service, under pressure, “relaxed” its monopoly over express mail (a subdivision of first-class mail), the field quickly went to Federal Express and others, including DHL, which now has the contract to provide overnight service to all civilian executive agencies of the federal government.

Cub Scouts an Issue

By law, the Postal Service was given a monopoly over all letter mail--first- and third-class--and except for express mail, it is tenacious about it. It argues, to little dispute, that a monopoly guarantees universal mail service; competition could leave out-of-the-way towns and unpopular routes unserved.

As for third-class, or advertising, mail, it’s pre-sorted, heavily automated, and makes money, and the Postal Service is vigilantly protective, even threatening to have a Coram, N.Y., Cub Scout troop fined for putting fliers about its Christmas plans in local mailboxes.

The Postal Service’s newest critics are also its greatest threat. The Reagan Administration, eager to “privatize” almost everything, wants all mail service opened to unrestrained competition. Profit seekers in the private sector, it is assumed, would provide efficient service. The Postal Service argues that it’s really doing a good job. With those 154 billion pieces of mail delivered a year, it receives, at most, 400,000 complaints. It made money half of the past 10 years. And it has surveys indicating that more people feel “favorable” about the Postal Service than unfavorable.

Last February, moreover, marked the start of a five-year, $11-billion capital improvement plan. This included both new mail-handling equipment and new buildings. Nationwide, says Ken Currier, government relations liaison for the Postal Service, “the average age of Postal Service facilities is 32 years.”

Unfortunately, the whole agency was put back “on the budget” of Congress in 1985--a “little bookkeeping trick” ordered by David A. Stockman’s Office of Management and Budget, says Louis Delgado, staff director of the House subcommittee on postal operations and services. By including Postal Service figures again--which were then surpluses--Congress could reduce its own deficit without actually handling the money. “Our surplus just made their figures look better, but nothing really happened,” says Stewart.

This year, the little trick became a disaster. The Postal Service’s spending plans had already been reviewed, but the figures made the federal budget look even worse than it did, and the Postal Service was ordered to cut $1.25 billion from its expenditures over two years, a third from operating expenses and two-thirds from capital expenditures.

What to cut was up to the Postal Service, however, and some think there was “absolutely no excuse for cutting service,” says Delgado. “They just took the easy way out instead of tightening their belts and looking for other ways to limit waste and cut fat--at Washington headquarters, perhaps, where spending was allowed to increase by 7%.”

Less disputable, the cuts in capital spending “meant that new facilities that are needed, badly needed,” says Delgado, “are not going to get built or upgraded.” The result is a movement in Congress to get the Postal Service “off budget” again, so it “can go ahead with its projects,” says Delgado, “because it won’t be ‘government’ spending.”

Going off budget won’t solve all the Postal Service’s problems or quiet all complaints. The real issue, says Lewis, is that “since Congress took itself out of management, the Postal Service is not accountable to citizens. Residential mailers are unrepresented when its policies are set.”

Nader’s suggestion, says Lewis, is a national organization of residential mailers to attend hearings and lobby for their views. They might, for example, have suggested alternatives to those cuts in consumer services.

They might also suggest that Congress take the Postal Service back.