There’s no Republican or Democratic way of delivering mail. USPS needs an overhaul | Opinion

Tinkering around the edges of the U.S. Postal Service in an effort to improve it is not the answer to increasing complaints about its reliability here and around the nation.

Instead, it’s time to rethink the entire structure, governance and oversight of the USPS. Congress should consider appointing a representative national task force to recommend a path forward. The postal service is simply too important to the life of the nation — even in this time of widespread digital communication — to let its reliability problems remain.

As The Star’s Jonathan Shorman and Daniel Desrochers noted in a detailed report about USPS problems in the Kansas City metropolitan area, two area members of Congress, Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Republican Rep. Sam Graves, have been urging the post office to fix its delivery problems.

Cleaver has even suggested the possibility of reviving a U.S. House committee that once had oversight of the postal service. That committee was discontinued in 1995 after Republicans took control of the House the year before.

The postal service, Cleaver says, “is a massive, massive problem and we’ve got to deal with it.”

Other area members of Congress also have been focusing on the USPS, including Sen. Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, who has raised the possibility of reopening mail processing centers in Kansas that have been closed over the years.

Now is the time for a bipartisan and comprehensive approach to this matter. The U.S. Postal Service affects all Americans in some way, and there’s no Democratic or Republican way to deliver the mail.

Many private companies, utilities and other organizations urge customers to go paperless by conducting transactions, including bill payment, completely online. That’s one reason the Postal Service has seemed less and less vital to many people.

“Run it like a business” doesn’t work for many governmental responsibilities, though. This is a prime example. Millions of Americans, particularly in rural areas, rely heavily on the USPS. That’s also true of primarily elderly people whose technical know-how or access to high-speed internet service are limited.

As it happens, the USPS is in a 10-year process of transforming itself. That plan is called Delivering for America, and it’s being guided by controversial Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, the GOP megadonor who was appointed in 2020 to the USPS Board of Governors. At that time, the board was controlled by members named by then-President Donald Trump, and, among other complaints, there were charges that DeJoy was using the service to slow down vote-by-mail efforts.

Now, most of the board members are appointees of President Joe Biden, but even so, that body has not moved to replace DeJoy, who has surprised critics on the left and angered allies on the far right by helping pass the Postal Service Reform Act last year.

That bill was an important step toward shoring up the post office, but the entire USPS governing system should get a review as we rethink the nation’s mail delivery system for the 21st century. Is the board really the most efficient and effective way to oversee this vital service, or should some other governance models be considered?

The goal, clearly, should be the reliability of all USPS services. Getting there will require a willingness to ask hard questions and challenge traditional ways of doing things. Are letter carriers and mail sorters trained well enough? Are they paid decent wages? Is the hiring process open and fair?

These and many other questions need to be asked and answered, and the process for doing so must be transparent to all.

The days of 3-cent first-class postage stamps are long gone. But it’s still a bargain that grandparents, for instance, can put a 63-cent stamp on an envelope containing a birthday card for a grandchild who lives thousands of miles away and those good wishes can arrive in a few days.

The U.S. Postal Service has never had an official motto, though Americans have informally applied one for a long time: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

But without a major effort to fix what’s wrong with the post office, that motto might have to be expanded with a new coda: “ … unless, of course, something else gets in the way.”