COVID has very fundamentally changed the equation.
Also, some institutions are more adaptive than others, some are more resilient. I suggest the USPS is very low on 'adaptiveness', but probably fairly resilient.
From requiring pre-funding retirements years ago, to DeJoy dismantling sorting machines just a few months ago.
It's hard to know how adaptable a system is, when it's actively being torn down at every opportunity.
As long as it's not a wedge issue, the Dems are fine siding with the Republicans.
The load that is distributed by the postal service has changed in nature dramatically to be far more packaged intensive and far far less letter-intensive than it used to be.
The sorting machines that were being removed were letter sorting machines because nobody sends letters anymore except for junk mail. Room has to be made for more package sorting machines. That was the explanation for the moves but the timing made people suspicious and the suspicions were jumped upon by political actors in an election year.
Nobody bother to ask themselves why the GOP would remove sorting machines in states that are definitely going blue if it was part of some grand scheme. Again I really don't like the GOP and have never even voted for a GOP candidate but I get fed up with politics bleeding over into reality via misinformation designed to create an emotional and stressful feeling in potential voters to ensure they cast their ballots because that's what this is.
If they were not planning on dismantling and damaging the way the system functioned, then it would be overwhelmingly obvious that simply the optics of literally dismantling infrastructure in an election year that would be the most widely dependent on mail are atrocious.
People were not "suspicious" of the timing. People refused to believe someone could be so stupid as to think they could do what DeJoy did in good faith, after being appointed by someone openly demanding the shutdown of the system, and not look like they were blatantly performing a political hit job. No good faith actor would possibly act that way.
Have you ever heard of equipment changes at the USPS in the past? Probably not. Do you think they never changed USPS equipment in previous years, under different presidents?
I've voted blue my whole life, but that doesn't mean I'm going to remain silent while dumb conspiracy theories with no evidence are weaponized to drive voter turnout. There are real world consequences to weaponizing misinformation, including the undermining of trust in systems of government.
Every serious bit of attention to these kinds of stories further bolsters the notion that conspiracies in government are routine, and feeds right wing extremists just as much as (if not more) than left-wing extremists.
Any time you find yourself "mind reading" people, assuming that "it couldn't just be a coincidence" you should ask yourself if you are being manipulated by weaponized propaganda.
And as a lifelong Democrat who has taught workshops to journalists at the Center for American Progress in the past, I think a huge issue for the future of the party is that fact that most of the corporate media has followed the Fox News confirmation bias monetization strategy, but chosen to target the left. The DeJoy story, like Benghazi on the right, has elements of truth mixed in with pure speculation, and is primarily narrative built on narrative built on narrative with kernels of actual truth scattered here and there. You end up getting silly things like pictures from hyper blue states like NJ and CA with Twitter addicts claiming that the truck hauling mailboxes from Encinitas to Riverside is "rigging the election." It's just plain silly paranoia.
It's hopeless. I've also tried to point out the logical flaws in peoples' USPS conspiracy theories (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290622), with little success. It's just as hopeless to tell people that Congress forcing the USPS to prefund pensions was a) bipartisan and b) a good thing, as opposed to yet another GOP anti-USPS plot.
Mail in votes were going to be a big deal that election. Even if flats were down as you said, it doesn't seem intuitive that you would reduce the ability to process flats prior to an election that depends on them.
Also why did they continue when ordered by federal judges to stop the destruction of the machines?
Why not wait till after an election where mail in ballots were going to be a big force, in the midst of a pandemic?
It's hard to cleanly separate standard procedure from ill intent, when the president himself is simultaneously railing against mail in ballots, while his appointees are overseeing the reduction of systems that assist in processing them.
I can't find any thing that backs up your version of events and I've tried searching. Though I'd like to see more about it.
USPS pension funding gets brought up quite a bit as some kind of a conspiracy, but that doesn't appear to be accurate.
The issue for the postal service is that the law was changed so that the USPS would start funding their retirement health care costs since they are promised to the workers and the projected costs had exploded. This was supported by a bipartisan commission, the GAO, and the Postal Service itself:
>...Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>Prior to 2006, the Service simply paid retirees’ health benefit premiums when they came due. The Service put aside no money when it promised the future benefits. Paying benefits when they come due rather than funding them in advance is known as the pay-as-you-go or unfunded approach. >Early this century, Congress, the Administration, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), and a bipartisan presidential commission expressed concern about the lack of funding. Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>In 2002-2003, it was discovered that the Service was contributing far more than necessary to fully fund its pensions, and Congress allowed the Service to contribute less. Congress decided the pension “savings” could help patch the retiree health benefit underfunding. In 2006, as part of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), the Postal Service Retirement Health Benefits Fund (RHBF) was established. Most of the Service’s contributions to the new fund could be paid using the pension “savings.” PAEA was bipartisan legislation with broad support.
https://taxfoundation.org/postal-service-reform-postal-servi...
>...If they didn't have to prepay pensions (something no other government agency, or private company in the world is required to do, or does), they'd be in great shape.
In relation to this, the USPS has posted this as part of a fact sheet:
>...More recently, the USPS Fairness Act was passed by the House. It would eliminate the requirement to prefund retiree health benefits and forgive our current defaulted prefunding payments. However, ultimate passage of the bill will not reduce our underlying retiree health benefits liability, nor improve our cash flow or long-term financial position.
https://about.usps.com/news/delivers-facts/usps-delivers-the...
In addition to the reasoning you posted, this is factually incorrect. Every single private company in the US is legally required to prefund their pension plans (there's some complex laws handling the actuarial stuff and interest rates, eg MAP-21). It's so incredibly wrong to say that the post office is an outlier because they're required to. The post office was an outlier until they were required to prefund pensions. It also muddies the waters to conflate retiree health insurance with pension plans.
Per this, your statement isn't fully correct either, since the new rulings made the USPS an outlier.
It was misleading of Bishop to bring up pensions in your linked politifact article[1]
Take the case where every company in the USA (including the post office) is required to do X and Y, but only the USPS is required to do Z. It's a true statement to say that "only the post office has to do Z". It's also a true statement to say "Only the post office has to do all 3 of X, Y, and Z". But the latter statement is abusing boolean logic to make it sound like X and Y only apply to the post office.
[1]: It's also misleading to say they "must fund 100% of the costs in advance" when the actual requirement is that the pension plan be "fully funded". If you're fully funding your pension plan, compound interest is probably covering at least 50% of the costs.
Snail-mail is in trouble in most parts of the developed world, because online services have replaced so many processes that were running on paper.
Providing an example from my country and neighbours, i.e. the Nordics. Look at the graph that has numbers of delivered letters in different countries - it has roughly halved in 10 years, and the trend continues:
https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-11236284
Parcel deliveries are growing, but there the postal services have competition.
As the volume of letters decreases - particularly in businesses and offices but also in private lives - it becomes increasingly difficult to run the service without financial loss.
There is always a limit on how much money you can get from the government so they would have to save on expenditure with the decline.
It's nice to have but it can't be considered critical anymore. Bills, paychecks and other important mail needs to be delivered digitally, there's no turning back.
edit: parcels and legacy papers still need to work everywhere though and that is worth some public spending, but if you live in the middle of nowhere you have to accept longer deliveries on fewer days of the week.
A natural way in this situation is to make deliveries less often; we no longer need official letters urgently, except in quite rare exception cases that can probably be covered by parcel delivery services, with tracking (and much higher cost for the small number of deliveries).
Over here, the postal service tries to solve this by arranging deliveries only three times a week, and in future perhaps once a week. I find that quite acceptable. If information needs to reach me faster, it'll come on-line anyway. A week's wait is OK for legacy services where someone wants a piece of physical paper with my signature, written on a pen, on it.