HUFFINGTON
07.22.12
GOINGPOSTAL
towns like Syria, but everywhere.
And Americans who use the post
office — which is to say all Americans — may have to adjust their
expectations of government and
what it does for them.
“I have a 93-year-old father in
rural, south Alabama,” says Ben
Cooper, president of a business
association called the Coalition
for a 21st Century Postal Service.
“He knows what time the letter carrier comes. If he doesn’t
come at the right time, my father
blames the government. Most
people out there have a hard time
getting their hands around trillions of dollars of debt and the
[European Union] and all of this.
But they see the government in
simple things like the postal service. If it fails and it doesn’t do
what’s expected of it, people see
the fabric crumbling.”
MAIL IS LIKE OXYGEN
Patrick Donahoe, the U.S. postmaster general since 2010, has
put himself in an unusual position
for a civil servant. He’s essentially pleading with Congress to
allow him to put his own agency
through significant cuts.
To right the agency, he says it’s
necessary to pare back the work-
force by another 150,000, eliminate Saturday delivery and close
postal facilities that are a drag on
the agency’s bottom line.
“Americans are smart people.
They know we can’t have the same
levels of service and the same size
of an organization as we did in the
past,” Donahoe says. “We don’t
want to be a burden. We take no
tax money. We want to run this
like any other business.”
Though overseen by the federal
government, the postal service
is an independent agency whose
budget comes from postage fees,
not taxpayer dollars. It’s a business that isn’t really a business —
a corporation that must answer to
Congress whenever its managers
want to make structural changes.
Because of this quasi-corporate,
quasi-governmental standing, the
postal service suffers from an inherent conflict, says Ron Bloom, the
turnaround expert who helped lead
the bailout of the auto industry.
“You must make money, and
you must carry out all these social functions at the same time,”
Bloom says.
Unlike other businesses, the
postal service has a “universal
service” obligation, meaning it
must serve every American home
and business — including the
most far-flung. It must also charge
the same price for a letter wheth-