Calls to privatize the U.S. Postal Service are invasive plants crossed with perennials: They crop up on a regular basis and spread in ideologically fertile soil, from think tanks to politicians to certain kinds of impressionable undergrads, and back again.
Five years ago, we reported on the billionaire who was trying to undermine the postal service since the 1970s, Charles Koch. The billionaires behind postal service privatization are back.
Donald Trump floated it in his first term and in December of last year said, “We’re looking at it.” In January, the Heritage Foundation predictably asked, “Do We Still Need the Post Office?” and even more predictably answered, “No.” And billionaire Oval Office mascot Elon Musk advocates privatizing every public thing that can be.
This week, a Harvard University senior lecturer, vice president for research at the Cato Institute, and author of Libertarianism, from A to Z, and a student at Harvard College made the privatization call in a Boston Globe op/ed, which also appeared, in slightly altered forms, as an article on the substack Libertarian Land and a blog post at the Cato Institute website. One has to admire their commitment to recycling.
The privatization calls have been met with strong resistance across the country, with postal workers leading rallies in Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and California, as we reported in our weekly Privatization Report last month.
Now, a report issued this week from the Institute for Policy Studies shows the harm privatizing the U.S. Postal Service would cause, particularly to suburban and rural Americans. Post Offices offer a variety of vital services to communities, and the universal service obligation means even remote rural households have letter carriers delivering to them.
The report, “Who Would Pay the Biggest Price for Postal Privatization?” outlines the ways rural communities would suffer under a for-profit postal service, including:
- The shuttering of many rural post offices and the related loss of postal jobs that pay decent wages with benefits.
- Potential disruption of deliveries of pharmaceuticals and other essentials. Military veterans, for instance, receive 84 percent of their prescriptions through USPS and more than a quarter of veterans live in rural areas. Private corporations would be able to refuse deliveries to remote areas.
- Disruption of “vote by mail.” With their polling sites located further distances apart than in urban areas, rural residents are particularly reliant on the mail-in option provided by our public Postal Service.
The Institute for Policy Studies also produced a summary with a breakdown of the report findings. Well worth the reading.
In Solidarity,
Donald Cohen
Executive Director