On this SC island, the post office is personal

I once was the largest customer of the U.S. Postal Service. Now I am one of its smallest.

Okay, technically I wasn’t its biggest customer, but the magazine company I worked for, Time Inc., was for many decades. So big that it invented the zip code. You can look it up.

Today, I live in a zip code that is a rural sea island outside Charleston. Of the fewer than 3,000 people who live here, more than half are African-American. We have no gas stations, cafes, or grocery stores. The nearest pharmacy to my house is 12 miles away.

We do have a U.S. Post Office, where, sooner or later, you will run into anybody who lives on the island. It is tiny. We know the small staff by name, and they know us. They are competent and personable, and they deliver our mail — bills, Social Security and V.A. checks, political fliers, catalogs, prescription drugs, money orders and even stuff that we order on Amazon. We depend on it.

Back when I was a big customer, I learned a lot about the post office. Whenever a new postmaster general was appointed I was required to sit and listen to their vision of “running the post office like a business.” Often they would mention Wal-Mart, which is renowned for its logistics and is the nation’s second largest employer, behind only the federal government. The USPS, with 633,000 employees, is third.

The Postal Service and Wal-Mart are almost exact opposites in many respects, but the USPS is pretty good at logistics too. It delivers about 150 billion pieces of mail a year to 142 million “delivery points.” Wal-Mart is a company and a stock. The Post Office is a public service, specifically mandated in the Constitution. It’s there to provide reliable mail service to every American — even if maintaining my little post office doesn’t pay off.

Republicans, who love the word “privatize,” hate the Post Office. The epitome of big government, it pays well, harbors powerful public unions, and guarantees pensions and health care benefits, which by law it must fully pre-pay 75 years in advance. So, surprise, it operates with perennial budget deficits. Last year’s was $8 billion, which apparently horrifies President Trump, who has driven the astronomical growth of our national budget deficit, now approaching $4 trillion.

The president opposes helping USPS during the pandemic because he says he wants to discourage mail-in balloting in the upcoming election. He has seen the numbers: many more Democrats plan to vote by mail than do Republicans.

Enter Trump’s solution: Louis DeJoy, a major GOP fundraiser who assumed the job of Postmaster General two months ago. DeJoy scarcely arrived before he removed the top two operating executives and almost two dozen others, clearing the decks for the destruction of more than 600 expensive mail sorting machines and the wholesale removal of USPS mail drop boxes. Significant delays in mail followed immediately. Duh!

I’ve seen a lot of “change agent” CEOs operate up close — from GE’s Jack Welch to Steve Jobs on his return to Apple. Never have I seen anything like DeJoy’s cleaning out the executive ranks of the USPS in his first few weeks on the job. This wasn’t strategic re-engineering; this was a hostile occupation. Now is not the moment to re-engineer the Post Office, but that isn’t what happened here. It was a blatant, ham-handed effort to slow delivery of mail at the behest of a president who fears losing an election.

Fortunately, these guys are so out of touch with real people like my sea island neighbors that it never occurred to them that screwing up our mail might actually disrupt lives to the point that the reaction would resemble a poked hornet’s nest. Mail from out of town, including express mail, has slowed noticeably, sometimes late as much as a week. And my neighbors freaked out when a well-used collection box on the island next door was sealed and marked “out of order.”

DeJoy, facing legal action from 20 state attorneys general and emergency Congressional hearings Monday on the havoc he’s wreaked (as well as conflict of interest questions), issued a press release Tuesday claiming he would wait until after the election before further action. But he is just another passing figure in Trump’s parade of hatchetmen who aim to please.

For the president himself, it’s all in a day’s work. He may not get away with jamming the works of our Post Office, but in trying he’s cast doubt on the credibility of the election among many of his followers. The only way he can lose, he said in Wisconsin Monday night “is if the election is rigged.”

Or perhaps if all those mail-in ballots from Democrats show up on time.

This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 9:04 AM.