In many ways, the position is a natural one for Democrats. “We are for the public having the Postal Service meet the public interest, not some special interest." “Their goal has always been to privatize, to make a profit off the Postal Service for private purposes,” Ms. “We have to fight for the post office,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on Thursday, highlighting the contours of the emerging fight. And administration officials have made it clear that they will not sign off on any financial support - either in the form of a loan or direct funding - unless the Postal Service agrees to rate increases, labor concessions and other changes that would shrink the agency’s footprint, potentially saving money and benefiting private competitors like FedEx and UPS. It was the White House that intervened in March, nixing a bipartisan plan to provide $13 billion to the Postal Service. The drastic increase, which most independent analysts say would ultimately hurt the Postal Service, appears to be aimed chiefly at Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, and whom Mr. Trump declared recently, announcing that he would not support any additional financial support for the agency unless it raised package rates by 400 percent. On one side is President Trump and his Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, who have largely looked at the agency’s worsening bottom line as a problem of its own making. Now, the fight over the future of the Postal Service has spilled onto the campaign trail, increasingly freighted by deeply held disagreements about labor rights, the role of government versus private enterprise in providing basic services, and voting access. ![]() Without a financial rescue from Congress, they have warned, an agency that normally runs without taxpayer funds could run out of cash as soon as late September, raising the specter of bankruptcy and an interruption in regular delivery for millions of Americans.īut after nearly reaching a bipartisan deal for a multibillion dollar bailout in the last coronavirus rescue package in late March, Republicans and Democrats have sharply diverged over whether to provide a lifeline. Postal leaders and their allies have made unusually blunt appeals for support in recent weeks, running advertisements on President Trump’s favorite Fox News programs and laying out an urgent account of how the pandemic has had a “devastating effect” on the U.S. ![]() The future of the mail may hang in the balance. Americans consistently rate it their favorite federal agency, and with a work force of more than half a million scattered across the country, it employs more people than any government entity outside the military.īut as Washington begins to battle over the next round of coronavirus relief funding, the United States Postal Service, for many the most familiar face of the federal government, has landed improbably at the center of one of the most bitter political disputes over who should be rescued, and at what cost. Its roots stretch back almost 250 years to the Second Continental Congress.
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