COMMENTARY | According to CNNMoney, the U.S. Postal Service is ending next-day service for regular mail, saving more than $2.1 billion at the expense of 28,000 jobs. The jobs could be wiped out by the end of 2012, marring the jubilation of recent reports of declining unemployment this fall, as reported by Reuters. What's bad about the slow, agonizing death of the U.S. Postal Service is not just its human toll but the revelations it reveals about government inefficiency and lack of foresight.
What says this about our government? It is worrisome because one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed so rapidly was that bureaucrats, in an effort to save their jobs and funding, lied about performance and financial figures and refused to relinquish power, according to nobel-winners.com. Does an unwillingness to accept technological progress, obsolescence of old methods, and private sector out-performance lead to painful government collapse down the road?
Could the poorly-anticipated obsolescence of the U.S. Postal Service signal deeper cracks in the overall federal government infrastructure, including Social Security, Medicare and defense?
Someone should have seen the effects of the Internet on the Postal Service many years ago and put forth a plan to downsize the government agency in manageable stages. The ability for data, documents and correspondence to be transferred instantaneously should have immediately warned of impending doom for any system that relied upon traditional mail, just as the inevitable graying of America's population and the increased prevalence of hourly, nonbenefited jobs at the expense of full-time jobs should warn of impending doom for Social Security.
The advent of the Internet should have signaled an orderly downsizing of the Postal Service, but that call went unheeded. Today we must act to ensure current trends do not catch us unaware a decade from now and force the rapid, painful, slashing death of Social Security, Medicare and many functions of the Defense Department.
This is a rough task because, due to the nature of public administration, bureaucrats and politicians will fight tooth and nail to avoid giving up a single dollar of funding. In government you are either growing or dying, and that is a culture that must change in order to make necessary cuts as painless as possible. The distraught families of laid-off USPS employees next year are the result of poor planning and a culture that emphasizes never yielding a cent of funding.
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