WSWS.org: Less than 24 hours before the Trump administration demanded an additional $200 billion for the war against Iran, members of Congress from both parties convened a hearing to warn that the United States Postal Service (USPS) could run out of money by next February.
Testifying before the House Oversight Committee, Postmaster General David Steiner, a former CEO of Waste Management and board member of FedEx, bluntly warned that the agency is approaching collapse. “At our current rate we will be out of cash in less than 12 months,” Steiner said. “So in about a year from now the Postal Service will be unable to deliver the mail, if we continue the status quo.”
The financial crisis of the United States Postal Service was presented to Congress this week as a matter of bipartisan concern, with leading Democrats and Republicans united in calling for sweeping “cost-cutting” measures that would further erode wages, staffing and universal service.
The USPS, which employs over half a million workers and delivers more than 100 billion pieces of mail annually, reported annual losses of roughly $9 billion. By contrast, the Pentagon’s budget has surged to nearly $1 trillion a year, before the additional $200 billion is factored in.
the opening days of the war against Iran, the US burned through more than $12 billion. In other words, the cost of less than a single week of war exceeds the yearly losses at USPS, which will be used to justify the deepest cuts in the history of the post office.
The “financial crisis” invoked by both parties is not simply the result of declining revenue but due to longstanding policy decisions. Above all is the requirement that the Post Office be entirely self-funding, first enacted in 1971 when it was demoted from a cabinet-level department of the federal government to an independent agency. This has been used to justify decades of cuts and set the stage for its eventual privatization.
This reached a new level over the past few years with the “Delivering for America” program, aimed at restructuring the USPS network along Amazon lines. Conditions in the “modernized” facilities are atrocious. Two workers, Nick Acker of Michigan and Russell Scruggs of Georgia, died late last year in separate incidents. Acker died after falling into a mail sort machine; his body was not found for hours. Scruggs died of a heart attack on the floor; EMS was considerably delayed in reaching him because of the fact that cell phone signals are blocked in the facility.