4 things to know about the Postal Service plan to slow rural mail delivery

If the check’s in the mail, as the saying goes, you might need to wait a little longer to get it.

The U.S. Postal Service is weighing plans to slow mail delivery in rural areas as a way to cut costs.

“At the end of the day, I think some portion of the mail showing up 12 hours later, I think it’s a price that had to be paid for letting this place be neglected,” Postmaster General Louis DeJoy recently told The Washington Post. “You look around every other country, [delivery] is longer, it’s much more expensive. We’re trying to save the Postal Service — not figuratively, not to advocate for something. We’re trying to literally save the Postal Service.”

According to the Post, under the plans being considered, “the Postal Service would allow mail and packages to sit at certain facilities for an extra day instead of transporting them immediately for processing and delivery, DeJoy said. That would extend acceptable delivery times for mail traveling longer distances.”

The Post further reported that pilot programs have already been underway — starting last year in Richmond, which, coincidentally or not, has led to a scathing audit by the Postal Service’s own inspector general and equally scathing political criticism from U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, and Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond.

The audit found the Richmond Processing and Distribution Center ill-prepared for the switch to new procedures. The inspector saw “mail over two months old left in a container in a truck yard” and “multiple instances of personnel throughout the facility not engaged in work. For example, we witnessed idle terminal handling service waiting for mail, and in one instance, a mail handler sleeping on a parked forklift.”

The website Save the Post Office — run by a retired New York professor who has taken an interest in postal delivery — says that 180 distribution centers (out of about 500 nationally) are now experimenting with slower delivery. Among those listed are ones in Roanoke and Northern Virginia, along with Greensboro, North Carolina, where a lot of mail for the western part of Virginia goes through.

That means many of us are already guinea pigs, although it’s probably best not to ship guinea pigs through the mail. The Kansas City public radio station KCUR reported recently that Midwestern farmers were receiving dead poultry in the mail because shipments of live birds were taking too long to get to their destination. The station quoted one Missouri farmer who expected a shipment of baby turkeys from Ohio to take two days. Instead, it took five days. The farmer tracked the delivery digitally: “They went to the Cleveland distribution warehouse, and they stayed there and stayed there.” The outcome was exactly what you’d expect: a box of dead birds.

Oh, one other thing: A federal audit found Virginia has the third slowest mail delivery in the country. Of course, at one time it was dead last, so there’s that.

It’s easy to beat up on the post office, so I’ll resist that temptation. Instead, here are some other observations.

1. The political silence is curious

Congressional response

I asked the three House members from the western part of the state about the Postal Service plan. Two responded:

“The United States Postal Service (USPS) proposal to allow slower mail delivery for long distance and rural service is a bad idea and should be reexamined. USPS does need to adapt a better business model to ensure timely delivery of mail, but cheating rural areas is not the appropriate course of action to accomplish that goal.”
— Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem

“Unfortunately, throughout my time in office I have regularly heard from Virginians about delayed delivery service, and we have worked with USPS to address those concerns. My team attended the most recent USPS Congressional briefing last week. We were assured that they were addressing the number one issue in Virginia —staffing levels. USPS has said they are bringing on enough carriers to meet existing delivery time standards. One solution is for the Biden-Harris Administration to stop paying able-bodied working-age Americans not to work.

“According to USPS, the new transportation changes for rural areas in 2025 would ensure two-thirds of all first class mail would be delivered within three days and all first class mail would be delivered within five days. USPS should assure all Virginians that there won’t be substantial new delays caused by their proposed plan.”
— Rep. Bob Good, R-Prince Edward County

Kaine and McClellan have been quite vocal about the problems in the Richmond processing center. “I deal with a lot of federal agencies,” Kaine said earlier this year . “I take tours of federal facilities all the time. I’ve never had a harder experience getting in, getting answers, and getting a tour in any office” than he has at the Richmond Processing and Distribution Center. In a more formal statement, he told Cardinal News: “Over the past year, Virginians have experienced significant mail delays because U.S. Postal Service (USPS) reforms have been poorly implemented and not received buy-in from USPS employees on the ground. I have brought Virginians’ experiences to the highest levels of leadership at USPS and will continue to push the agency to ensure any plan that is implemented does not negatively impact customer service for the millions of Americans who rely on the Postal Service.”

The problems with the Richmond center may be unique to that facility (or maybe not), but the proposal to slow rural delivery is a national policy — yet I can’t find any evidence that either of our major party presidential candidates has spoken out about it. Granted, this might not be the most important issue in the land, but that rarely makes a difference in politics. Not many of us understand the nuances of foreign policy, but we all understand when the mail is late. This seems a classic “kitchen table” issue.

This also seems like one that offers political opportunity for whichever candidate wants to seize it.

For Donald Trump: His base is disproportionately rural. To win many swing states (including Virginia), he needs a heavy rural turnout. Here’s a case where rural residents — primarily Trump voters — are about to get the shaft. Why isn’t Trump speaking out on this? He’s vowed to fire as many civil servants as he can (something that has economic implications for rural Virginia, but that’s a different column). How about starting with the Postal Service Board of Governors and promising that rural residents won’t become second-class citizens when it comes to a key government service? After all, there are now more Joe Biden appointees on that board than there are Trump appointees. Reducing rural mail delivery hardly seems consistent with making America great again.

For Kamala Harris: She’d be in a much better position to win those swing states if she could reduce Trump’s thunderous margins in rural areas even just a wee bit. Here’s an easy way to make the case that she cares about rural America and that Trump is bad for his own supporters: DeJoy was a Trump supporter who was appointed by a board of governors dominated by Trump appointees. Harris ought to make Trump own this proposed slowdown in rural delivery — and promise to leave no part of the country behind.

This is a bigger deal than it may seem, especially for Democrats. We’re not just talking about mail delivery here, we’re talking about faith in government. My urban and suburban friends may not appreciate the importance of mail delivery, but let me assure you, we rural residents do. I’m probably not unusual: I don’t have municipal water, I no longer have kids in school, I don’t even have to commute to work anymore now that I have broadband, so sometimes days go by without having to drive on public roads. Instead, most days my only direct interaction with any government entity is when the mail carrier shows up. Democrats believe that government can be a positive force in society. It’s hard for rural residents to believe that when the government entity we are most familiar with doesn’t work very well. If government can’t do something seemingly as simple as deliver the mail on time, how can it be trusted to run a universal health care system or (insert your favorite proposed government action here)?

2. There’s a philosophical choice to make here

From time to time, we often hear candidates (typically certain types of Republicans) say that government should be run like a business. Reducing rural mail delivery is a direct consequence of that line of thinking. Any company in the delivery business would do this without thinking twice. In fact, at least one already has: UPS — aka, United Parcel Service — started cutting back on some of its rural deliveries last year, according to Supply Chain Dive. Rural customers may not like that, but I’m sure shareholders do.

The philosophical choice here is whether the Postal Service should be run like a business (which might very well conclude that some areas are too expensive to serve regularly) or a government agency, where everyone can expect the same service (we don’t tell rural residents that they have to live with shorter voting hours because it’s too difficult in sparsely populated areas to staff a precinct all day). Of course, if we go with the latter, then we have to pay for it. (A less helpful but perhaps just as accurate analogy deals with public safety. The local sheriff’s office or fire department will respond to any emergency anywhere but, realistically, it’s going to take longer to reach people who live in far-flung places. The slower response time is just the price you should expect to pay if you live way out in the woods like me. Should the same principle apply to postal delivery? I don’t like that idea, but I have to admit it’s a possible argument.)

Yes, yes, there’s the 2006 law that requires the Postal Service, unlike other government entities, to pre-fund its retiree health care benefits for 75 years in the future. That requirement is a big reason the Postal Service has run a deficit. That law, which passed Congress on a voice vote, has been called “one of the worst pieces of legislation Congress has passed in a generation” by a New Jersey congressman. Update: The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 eliminated that provision. Regardless, the problem of rural delivery remains: If we want rural Americans to have the same level of postal service as other Americans, someone needs to pay for it. I’m not hearing either party make the case for who should pay more to subsidize rural delivery.

3. The U.S. Postal Service does things other countries don’t do

DeJoy says other countries have more expensive postal services and take longer to deliver their mail. I’m not sure what a fair comparison is, but here’s an easy one: The U.S. Postal Service still delivers on Saturday. The country closest to us, geographically and culturally, does not. Canada stopped delivering mail on Saturday in urban areas in 1969 and in most rural areas in 1982. In 2013, Canada Post began phasing out door-to-door delivery in urban areas, in favor of clusters of neighborhood mailboxes. Even with those cost-cutting moves, Canada Post last year lost $748 million as measured in Canadian loonies, or $554 million in American greenbacks.

The U.S. Postal Service floated a plan in 2013 to do away with Saturday mail delivery, but Congress promptly passed a law to require Saturday delivery. In Europe, Great Britain and Germany are outliers because they still deliver mail six days a week. France has reduced mail deliveries to three days a week. The British newspaper The Telegraph reports that “Italy has moved to an every other day service in rural areas, Norway runs two rounds a week and Denmark only delivers standard class letters once a week.” We think of European countries as more likely to subsidize government services than we are, but here’s an example where European countries are applying free market principles to a government service in a way we’re not.

Finally …

4. No, mail is not obsolete

Yes, the volume of mail has declined as people switch to email and social media as a way to communicate. Statista reports that postal volume peaked in 2006 at 213 billion units and fell to 116.15 billion units last year. We also all know that much of that is, frankly, junk mail. We also know that bills, which used to come only by mail, are now increasingly coming online. Still, not everyone has the internet (especially in rural areas where the percentage of people with broadband is typically lower) and not everyone wants to use it. (As we compiled our Voter Guide, we found a surprising number of candidates for various local offices who don’t have email.) Yes, if you want to ship a package, you often have other options from private delivery companies. However, they don’t deliver to all addresses — something the Postal Service does. That brings us back to our philosophical question: Is it OK for rural Americans to have slower mail delivery than their urban counterparts? If not, how much are we willing to pay for that, and who’s going to pay?

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