Democrats are accusing President Trump of trying to rig the upcoming election by interfering with the United States Postal Service (USPS) in an effort to hamper mail-in voting, but the simple truth is that there is no truth to this claim whatsoever.
In May, a scathing report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed what has been widely known for more than a decade: The Postal Service is in deep financial trouble. Since it is designated as an independent agency, it is not funded by tax money but is rather expected to support itself through the fees it charges. As technology has made email and messaging communication far easier and competitors such as FedEx, UPS, and Amazon have eaten into the Post Office's package delivery service, fewer and fewer people are paying to send mail. This has been a big and worsening problem since 2009, when the GAO designated the USPS as being at high risk for fiscal insolvency.
"Since GAO’s 2009 high-risk designation, the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) financial viability has progressively worsened due to declining mail volume, increased employee compensation and benefit costs, and increased unfunded liabilities and debt," the report, which was issued in May, noted. "First-Class Mail volume has declined 44 percent since fiscal year 2006. Additionally, employee compensation and benefits costs have been increasing. Although USPS’s work force declined from about 786,000 in fiscal year 2007 to about 617,000 in fiscal year 2013, USPS’s work force increased to about 630,000 in fiscal year 2019. Finally, total unfunded liabilities and debt continue their steady upward trend."
This has resulted in the USPS losing roughly $78 billion from 2007 through 2019.
Senator Barack Obama recognized this while campaigning for President in 2008.
"If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine," he told a crowd at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. "It's the Post Office that's always having problems."
When Obama took office, his Administration attempted to ease the financial crush on the USPS by altering collection routes and removing mailboxes that simply weren't being used.
"In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural routes and suburban neighborhoods – more than the 175,000 that remain," The Washington Post reported in 2009.
Between 2011 and 2016, the Obama Administration ordered an additional 14,000 mailboxes removed because they were "underperforming," which the USPS defines as collecting fewer than 25 pieces of mail per day. This routine elimination of mailboxes to consolidate mail collection and keep operational costs down has continued since President Trump was inaugurated in 2017, but now President Obama and his Vice President, Joe Biden, are casting this as an attempt by Trump to keep people from voting by mail.
"What we've never seen before is a president say, 'I'm going to try to actively kneecap the postal service to encourage voting and I will be explicit about the reason I'm doing it,'" Obama told his former advisor David Plouffe.
This is a lie and it is directly contradicted by the President's actions over the past six months. As the Washington Examiner reported:
In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, the $2 trillion relief measure passed in March, Congress gave the Postal Service a $10 billion borrowing authority. After the bill became law, there were negotiations between the Postal Service and the Treasury Department on the terms of the borrowing; a deal was announced in July. The ability to borrow $10 billion, the postmaster general said, would "delay the approaching liquidity crisis."
That was all the aid for the Postal Service in the CARES Act. Completely separately, the bill also gave $400 million to something called the Election Assistance Commission for distribution to states to "prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus, domestically or internationally, for the 2020 federal election cycle."
This, however, wasn't enough for Democrats, who are now demanding a $25 billion bailout for the Post Office in the next round of Coronavirus relief funding as well as $3.5 billion for mail-in voting. On Fox Business Network, President Trump said that was simply too much.
"You know, there's nothing wrong with getting out and voting, you get out and vote," he said. "They voted during World War I and World War II, and they should have voter ID because the Democrats scammed the system. But, two of the items are the Post Office and the $3.5 billion for mail-in voting. Now, if we don't make a deal, that means they don't get the money...That means they can't have universal mail-in voting, they just can't have it. So, you know, sort of a crazy thing. Very interesting.”
Democrats have interpreted this as Trump admitting that he is deliberately trying to sabotage mail-in voting by preventing the passage of desperately needed funding for it, but this claim too falters under the weight of the facts: The Post Office can already handle the expected flood of mailed ballots this November, as the Washington Examiner notes:
According to its most recent annual report, last year, in fiscal year 2019, the Postal Service handled 142.5 billion pieces of mail. "On a typical day, our 633,000 employees physically process and deliver 471 million mailpieces to nearly 160 million delivery points," the report says. This year, that number is higher, given the Postal Service's delivery of census forms and stimulus checks. Those alone added about 450 million additional pieces of mail.
In 2016, about 136 million Americans voted in the presidential election. The number will probably be a bit higher this year. If officials sent ballots to every single American registered to vote -- about 158 million people -- and then 140 million people returned ballots, the roughly 298 million pieces of mail handled over the course of several weeks would be well within the Postal Service's ability to handle. Of course, officials will not send a ballot to every American registered to vote, and not every voter will vote by mail. Whatever the final number is, the ballots that are cast by mail will not cripple a system that delivers 471 million pieces of mail every day.
Moreover, the notion that the Trump Administration has been systematically eliminating mail sorting machines in an attempt to further hamper mail-in voting is similarly baseless.
"Purchased when letters not packages made up a greater share of postal work, the bulky and aging machines can be expensive to maintain and take up floor space postal leaders say would be better devoted to boxes," The Washington Post reported. "Removing underused machines would make the overall system more efficient, postal leaders say. The Postal Service has cut back on mail-sorting equipment for years since mail volume began to decline in the 2000s."
The final prong of Democrats' conspiracy theory involves a change in the day-to-day operations of local post offices themselves, supposedly ordered by Postmaster General (and Republican donor) Louis De Joy. This, too, is false. The changes were ordered to streamline mail collection and limit mail carrier overtime costs, which top $1 billion per year.
The Washington Examiner again pointed out:
In the past, postal delivery worked this way: A worker would arrive in the morning and work on various things in the office -- sorting mail, handling holds on mail, waiting for incoming mail to arrive to prepare for delivery. That often involved waiting around for hours, and then starting an actual delivery route later in the day. Once started, a route has to be finished, and that involved workers going into overtime as they delivered through their route as evening approached.
DeJoy's plan, now being implemented in a pilot program in about 200 cities, is called Expedited to Street/Afternoon Sortation, or ESAS. Under it, a worker would arrive in the morning, collect all the mail that was ready to go out, and head out for delivery -- "retrieve, load, and go." Then, after finishing the delivery route, the carrier would return to the office and do in the afternoon the office work that used to be done in the morning. That way, when the end of his or her shift arrived, that would be the end of the workday, with no overtime incurred. Mail that arrived to the office in the afternoon, while the carrier was doing office work, would be delivered in the next morning's route. It would be ready and waiting when the carrier arrived for "retrieve, load, and go."
The effect to customers would be that mail that was delivered to the office in the afternoon would be delivered the next morning, instead of that evening. The effect to the Postal Service would be to save an enormous amount of money in overtime.
There is, therefore, no evidence that this change in operations was designed to or will have the effect of ballots not being delivered on time. In fact, there is no evidence for any of the claims that Democrats have made about the Postal Service over the past week. The idea that President Trump is somehow preventing the Post Office from doing its job in an effort to stop mail-in voting and steal an election is nothing more than a baseless, ridiculous conspiracy theory.