Mail Quarantine Hobbles Government

At the Labor Department, where incoming mail has been disrupted for 10 days, dozens of enforcement cases are jeopardized because the timing on legal deadlines is set when a litigant mails a document.

At the passport office, applications for passports have not been opened, so applicants’ foreign trips could be in peril.

And at the Capitol, congressional staffers charged with reading constituents’ mail have been dispatched to district and state offices because no mail is coming to Capitol Hill.

The mountain of mail that has been sequestered from government agencies and Congress because of the anthrax scare represents many thousands of attempts by Americans to seek the services of their government.

Greater dependence on phones, faxes, express mail and e-mail has filled in many of the gaps, but the cutoff of postal service has complicated government operations from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Patent and Trademark Office.

At least 30 tons of mail has been trucked to Lima, Ohio, where a private firm will irradiate it to kill any anthrax bacteria with machines like the ones used to decontaminate meat. It will be shipped back to Washington, where FBI agents and postal inspectors will analyze it for clues about the anthrax cases.

Meanwhile, Labor Department officials have been reaching out to judges and the other parties to identify what documents might be among the millions of pieces being held--and whether legal deadlines can be extended until the paperwork can be refiled.

“It has forced us to do a lot of legwork,” said Stuart Roy, spokesman for the department.

The Washington bureau of the U.S. passport office, which receives mail from two facilities where postal workers have contracted anthrax, has stopped opening mail.

“It’s obviously inconvenient,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher. “We are working with the Postal Service and others to try to get this back up and running as soon as possible.”

For Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the lack of mail has added to the confusion of being locked out of her office in the Hart Senate Office Building, which is still being tested for and decontaminated from anthrax. Boxer usually receives 5,000 to 10,000 pieces of mail a week.

“It’s another link to folks back home,” said David Sandretti, the senator’s spokesman. “We are still getting phone calls and e-mail. But when someone sits down at a kitchen table and writes a letter and licks a stamp--that’s a powerful message to an elected official. When it’s gone, it’s missed, no question about it.”

Boxer is urging constituents to address their mail to her California offices, and three Washington staff assistants have been sent to the senator’s California offices to handle the load.

California’s other senator, Democrat Dianne Feinstein, has sent six aides back to the state for the same purpose.

Constituents’ mail isn’t the only thing congressional offices are missing. The scheduler for Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego) has had the new responsibility of chasing down bills that are among the quarantined mail, according to Harmony Allen, the congressman’s spokeswoman.

She has called phone companies and office supply stores and asked them to fax bills.

“It has made work and life more difficult,” said Allen, who lives near the Capitol and has not been receiving personal bills.

The shutdown “has been a real source of frustration, because mail is the most important means of communication we have with our constituents,” said Doug Hattaway, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

“E-mail has grown in importance over the years, but snail mail is still the most important means of communication. Writing your senator is a time-honored tradition. It’s a cultural thing.”

The lack of mail has made it difficult for some agencies to communicate with Congress. For many agencies, postal mail was still the preferred way to relay information to members of Congress.

Until now, “all the official stuff was done with snail mail. This has been the preferred method because it’s formal,” said Roy of the Labor Department. “Now we are moving radically to more electronic communication.”

Most government benefit programs--from Medicaid health coverage to veterans benefits--are not processed or mailed from Washington addresses. And most taxpayers mail their tax checks to regional offices outside of Washington, so those services have not been interrupted, according to government officials.

Mail has not been delivered to the headquarters of the Treasury Department, which is next to the White House, for weeks, said Rob Nichols, a Treasury spokesman. “We have not had discernible disruptions,” he said, adding that Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill and his staff have relied on e-mail, faxes and conference calls to do their jobs.

At the Patent and Trademark Office, snail mail is still the favored means of correspondence for most people, though its use has fallen sharply.

On average, 1,000 patent applications arrive daily, as well as thousands of other letters inquiring about patents and trademarks. The office received no mail last week and has received only about 1% of its normal daily mail this week, according to Brigid Quinn, spokeswoman for the agency.

“We expect we will get it at some point,” Quinn said.

As for those letters from American children bearing $1 contributions for their counterparts in Afghanistan, the White House acknowledges that some of the letters may be quarantined, but promises that eventually they will be processed by the Red Cross for delivery overseas.