(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Your neighborhood mail carrier and their co-workers at your local post office are doing dangerous work these days. The coronavirus has killed 44 of the U.S. Postal Service’s 630,000 workers and an additional 1,219 have tested positive.
And the White House is threatening to kill the Postal Service itself unless it gets greater control over its operations and its future. If this was any other administration this might be written off as the federal government using a crisis to jockey for position and streamline a struggling enterprise long overdue for change. But this isn’t any other White House.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, President Donald Trump said that until the Postal Service raised its prices for package deliveries he wouldn’t allow Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to release $10 billion in aid earmarked for it in the federal government’s epic, $2.6 trillion national bailout.
“The Postal Service is a joke,” the president said. “Because they’re handing out packages for Amazon and other internet companies, and every time they bring a package they lose money on it.”
This isn’t true, of course. Package deliveries have provided a welcome boost to the Postal Service’s top and bottom lines in recent years. In fact, packages are a strength in an otherwise sagging operation pulled down by a steep drop on the amount of old-fashioned snail mail it delivers and a congressional mandate that it prefund future retiree health benefits for employees -- a reality I outlined in a recent column. Digital retailers like Amazon.com Inc. that ship copious loads of packages have been a financial godsend for the Postal Service, but that business hasn’t been nearly robust enough to replace all of that lost mail revenue. So a price increase on package deliveries isn’t the silver bullet the president claims it to be.The Postal Service certainly needs a silver bullet, and it should take the form of enough federal aid to sustain it and its workers in the near term. Postmaster General Megan Brennan told Congress recently that unless the Postal Service gets about $89 billion in grants and aid it will be out of money by the end of the year. A $10 billion grant is barely a start in that scenario, but it’s a much-needed start for an enterprise that provides vital connective tissue for the nation’s rural areas, senior citizens and commercial deliveries.Over the long term, the Postal Service needs to reimagine its services and its finances, and it could team up with the White House to do that. But all signs point to a White House more interested in controlling than rebuilding. The Washington Post reported on Thursday that Mnuchin is using the $10 billion lifeline as a bargaining chip that would allow the White House to take “unprecedented control over key operations.” That would include management of the Postal Service’s finances, senior hiring decisions (including the postmaster general) and union negotiations — as well as delivery charges for packages and the ability to review contracts with companies that use those services.
You know, companies such as Amazon.Amazon’s founder and chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, owns the Post, and Trump would undoubtedly consider the Post’s reporting shaded by that fact. I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think the Post’s reporting on the Postal Service was shaded at all, but I certainly think the president’s misguided hostage negotiations over the service’s future are shaded by his animosity toward Bezos.Trump has had Bezos in his sights for a long time. The Post has published seminal and award-winning coverage of Trump’s political and business dealings as well as his shortcomings, legal perils and personal life, making it a routine Trump target. Amazon is challenging the circumstances under which it lost a big cloud-services contract with the Pentagon last fall, an outcome that may or may not have had something to do with Trump’s dislike for Bezos. And Bezos famously butted heads with American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer, after the Enquirer threatened to publish intimate photos Bezos exchanged with his girlfriend. American Media’s CEO is David Pecker, a longtime Trump crony.
But as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Joe Nocera pointed out in an earlier column, it’s absurd to think that Trump can truly use the Postal Service to harm Bezos or Amazon. The company has already established its own delivery network to save money on delivery fees it pays FedEx and the United Parcel Service and it could possibly expand that system if working with the Postal Service becomes prohibitively expensive. The Postal Service, however, could lose out to FedEx and UPS if raising its delivery rates makes it less competitive with them.A responsible president would focus on fixing what actually needs to be fixed at the Postal Service rather than using it to settle old scores. On the other hand, a responsible president also wouldn’t suggest at a televised press briefing that injecting disinfectants might offer a promising cure for the coronavirus.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gestured at all of this in a press conference on Friday when asked whether the Postal Service would receive a federal bailout. She noted that seniors still rely on the service to receive medications and that the country will rely on it further if the pandemic makes vote-by-mail a necessity in November. She also said there had been bipartisan support to protect the Postal Service until Trump intervened. “They tell me it came right from the president,” she noted. “No money for the post office. Instead, inject Lysol into your lung as we shut down the states.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
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