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(WATCH) Snail Mail
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250 years into its existence, the US Postal Service is at a pivotal crossroads, stuck in a dead-letter pile of delays, deficits, and doubt with $9.5 billion in losses last year alone and mail sometimes taking weeks just to cross town. Today a Full Measure investigation looks inside delays and future plans in our cover story: Snail Mail.
The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.
The first thing you should know is: If you think your mail delivery has been sluggish, it’s not your imagination.
Sharyl: Is it taking longer than it did when you were in the 1980s?
Mark Dimondstein: It absolutely has taken longer.
Mark Dimondstein is president of the American Postal Workers Union. He’s helping us dig into the delays dragging down deliveries.
Sharyl: There’s something going on, it appears, where some of the mail is that should take a day is taking a week. Sometimes it’s taking weeks and months. To what do you attribute?
Dimondstein: There’s probably multiple reasons. Some of it is this challenging transition. Some of it is short staffing.
The mail trail to today’s mess is a long and winding route. The US Postal Service has been a cornerstone of American communication since it was created in 1775 under the first postmaster general: Benjamin Franklin.
In 1970, the USPS transitioned from a government department to an independent entity.
Modern automation promised to zip mail to every U.S. address while the USPS remained financially self-supporting. But in modern times, it’s delivered a troubling decline in speed and cost-effectiveness.
The USPS aims for 95% on time delivery stretching “on time” from three days to five in 2021 as part of cost cutting measures. The year’s first quarter claimed 86% success. But self-reported stats lacking independent proof leaves skeptics thinking it’s worse.
Even postal workers at USPS processing centers are frustrated by the sorting nightmare they face.
“Delivery standards have been reduced from top-down mandates by management,” one source tells me. “Mail used to come in today and be gone tonight. Now it comes in, sits and rots and eventually leaves when the old stuff is pointed out by the workers.”
Full Measure obtained images of mail sitting not for days but weeks at one processing center.
This letter marked “return to sender” took 18 days to get attention at the processing center. “Seriously… I could have walked it there in less time! I see this sort of thing routinely,” said an insider.
44 Certified Mail letters were found apparently forgotten. A worker on site noted on one letter that “the customer paid $10.24 to have it sit in this abandoned tray” —for nine days so far.
Other certified mail stamped January 29 and 31 was still sitting there two weeks later on February 13.
Mail stamped January 8 was still sitting being stored on February 1.
The mail backup was so large, 23 All Purpose Containers were filled with an estimated 184,000 pieces of backlogged mail.
Dimondstein, the union president, pins the logjam on a 2021 cost saving misstep: a pilot program for a Regional Transportation Optimization plan.
Sharyl: What’s an example of something that could happen with a local letter going to a nearby address before this change?
Dimondstein: Well, when I came into the post office in 1983, everything stayed local.
But the pilot program sent local letters on far-flung detours to distant hubs, delaying even next-door deliveries.
Dimondstein: I’ll give you an example. They had decided to take mail from Medford, Oregon where there’s a small processing plant to Portland, Oregon. It’s a six-hour truck ride. That’s an absurdity. Now, if you’re taking a package from Medford, Oregon and you’re sending it to Boston, Massachusetts, it may make perfect sense to consolidate in Portland, fill up the trucks, fill up the airplanes, and it makes the whole process more efficient. But that same package that I’m mailing from Medford to Medford, if it goes on a six-hour truck ride, it’s gonna be delayed by at least a day.
Sharyl: Each Way?
Dimondstein: If not more, each way. So those are the kind of things that we certainly have made strong appeals to management. That is not good service.
A recent Inspector General report criticized the Regional Transportation Optimization plan, finding that it slowed mail without yielding the promised savings.
Sharyl: So back in the olden days, way before your time and before my time, from what I understand, the mail came six or seven days a week. It came twice a day, right?
David Marroni: Yes it did, at one point in time.
David Marroni is with the Government Accountability Office or GAO. Its studied many facets of the postal services’ problems.
Sharyl: What would you say is the current state of the US Postal System?
Marroni: So, it’s poor. It’s in poor financial condition and it’s been that way for a long time.
Sharyl: Is there a simple answer right as to why it’s existed in such a poor state for such a long time?
Marroni: So its business model is fundamentally unsustainable.
Financially, the USPS is delivering staggering losses—$9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024 alone. Since 2007, cumulative losses exceed $98 billion, with unfunded liabilities and debt hovering around $143 billion as of 2018.
Marroni: So the most of what their money goes to is compensation to cover, to deliver the mail. So that’s compensation in terms of pay, that’s benefits for their employees. Health benefits, that’s about 75% of what USPS is paying for. Another 10% or so is for transportation, moving that stuff around the country. And the rest is for everything else: the facilities, the marketing costs, all the other things that USPS does.
The 2021 Delivering for America plan aimed to trim $30-$36 billion over a decade by consolidating hubs and slower rural delivery. But it’s misdelivered, and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy recently resigned.
Now, President Trump is eyeing a fix, floating a USPS merger with the Commerce Department under Secretary Howard Lutnick.
President Donald Trump (February 24): Well, we want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money. And we’re thinking about doing that. And it’ll be a form of a merger. But it’ll remain the Postal Service. And I think it’ll operate a lot better than it has been over the years. It’s been just a tremendous loser for this country. Tremendous amounts of money are being lost.
Sharyl: What are some of the options that we could do with the postal service beyond the current model?
Marroni: Yeah. So you could have it become a governmental entity again, where Congress basically subsidizes the postal service to keep it financially stable. You could privatize all or part of the postal service and try and deal with it there. You could do a mix of subsidies for some very specific tasks that the postal service does, where it runs like a business and others. All those are gonna have trade-offs, both for the taxpayer and the postal customer. So it’s important for Congress to think those through. But the bottom line is the current model doesn’t work, so something needs to change.
Dimondstein: There’s a lot of new talk about privatizing the postal service or taking it over or putting it up under the Commerce Department. And I just want the listeners to realize how dangerous that is to their postal services, and the reason it’s so dangerous is because the post office by law has to go to every single address six days a week and sometimes seven, but by law six days a week. If the post office were to be privatized, and what privatization means is it’s gonna be broken up and sold off to private corporations who would then make their decisions of where to send, where to go as to whether they can make a profit.
USPS commercial: I’ve traveled every road in this here land, I’ve been everywhere man, I’ve been everywhere man.
After decades of navigating its troubles, the USPS is still trying to find a return address to reliability. The question: Can the Trump administration deliver a plan that finally gets it all sorted out?
Sharyl (on-camera): For more on this story listen to my podcast Full Measure After Hours.
Watch video here.
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