The Founders never intended the Postal Service to be managed like a business (opens in new tab)

Can the postal service actually function as efficiently as commercial companies? There are laws and regulations that set how it must work:

* Title 39, U.S. Code, Section 101, 3622, 3401 * Title 18, U.S. Code, Sections 1701–1737

Interesting, the postal service has the largest service area, with last mile delivery to almost everywhere. I'm surprised that they haven't leveraged that to provide unique products and services.

Trump and his ilk basically want to tear down any institution that was made for the common good.

Mail used to be the primary way people communicated. Those days are long gone. As you would know if you were paying attention, the amount of first-class mail (which is what people send to each other) has been declining for decades. Even first-class junk mail has been declining, as well as the other forms of junk mail.

https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/

Email has killed it. The body lives on, but the brain is dead.

The post office isn't a "common good" anymore. It's a cheap way for businesses to deliver junk mail to consumers who throw most of it away.

That said, it pulled in $78 billion in revenue last year. And I haven't looked at their budget in any level of detail, but it sounds like the loss is due to the requirement to fully fund their healthcare and pension obligations (which the USPS has technically been defaulting on).

DeJoy got a lot of shit for trying to modernize the post office a few years ago, and the noise around him has died down since then. The one thing I remember was he was trying to stop Saturday delivery, which would have thrown thousands of post office employees out of work. PO employees historically were relatives of politicians (patronage), so that was a non-starter.

The writer seems to imply that "managed like a business" is a bad thing. There are concepts, like accountability, efficiency, customer orientation, and responsiveness that some government agencies have adopted to great effect. Maybe the writer should start investigating the world of business before dismissing it and saying that poor service, inefficienty, irrelevance, and high costs are OK if it's for "the common good."