The USPS Should Take the Lead

THESE HAVE GOT to be frustrating times over at the U.S. Postal Service.

First, they demand that you operate more like a business. When you try, they clobber you in the press and on Capitol Hill. They complain when you run in the red. Then they scream bloody murder when you try to raise rates at a time when you’re still running in the black.

I have no doubt the last year has been a very perplexing one for postal executives. I have little sympathy, though, because much of the perplexity is of their own making.

Despite all the noise about its operating in a “businesslike manner” or its being a postal “corporation,” the postal service remains as it always has been-an agency of the federal government. As a result, it is subject to congressional oversight. In addition, since the postal service still holds a statutory monopoly over the carriage of most mail, it is subject to a regulatory regime unlike any its private-sector competitors face.

The regulation, quite simply, is to ensure the USPS doesn’t abuse its statutory discretion in the absence of true, direct competition in all the markets it services.

Ever since former Postmaster General Marvin Runyon’s January 1994 National Press Club speech in which he declared postal reorganization an anachronism, the postal service ostensibly has been trying to convince Congress its charter is very much in need of legislative and regulatory change.

Ratemaking, the PMG told his audience, was “broken” and in need of repair. The postal service, he said, was hamstrung by regulatory constraints that no longer were relevant. Collective bargaining, he said, was “broken” and needed overhauling. Electronic competitors, he complained, were outside the USPS’ statutory monopoly and were eating the postal service’s financial transactions lunch.

You would imagine after laying out a case like this, the USPS would have gone after postal legislative reform with the verve of a biblical zealot. Well, guess again.

Rather than taking the lead on legislative reform, the postal service invited everyone from Congress to customers to take the lead in defining its fate. Congress asked the USPS for a substantive proposal, and it delivered nothing more than an Alphonse and Gaston retort, which ceded the political and legislative initiative to its ideological adversaries and its private-sector competitors. When the postal service finally managed to get off its duff and presented something for Congress’ consideration, it was woefully unsuited to the political realities it had let develop in the moments of its languor.

When a viable legislative proposal made its way onto the congressional scene, the USPS backed away from the negotiating table and hardened its stance. An erstwhile advocate of reform, the postal service took on the unsettling role of opponent. If it couldn’t get precisely what it wanted, no matter how unrealistic its expectations might be, the postal service wasn’t going to yield one inch of legislative ground to anyone-not even to the chairman of the very subcommittee who held its legislative fate in his hands.

Ticking off the subcommittee chairman was about the only success the USPS achieved by this posture-a victory of the kind only Pyrrhus could love.

Today’s postmaster general, William Henderson, appears not to be as eager as his predecessor in making a point he can only take to the postal service’s grave. Unfortunately, he now has to harvest the weeds that were sown in what should have been legislative fields fertile for reform. Instead of a Congress eager to help the USPS move into the 21st century, we now have a Congress that seems much more eager to rein in the postal service’s obstinacy and indiscretion. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Never have so few done so much unwise to so many.”

A postmaster general, however, can only go as far as his governing board will let him. I can’t honestly say the postal governors have showered themselves with glory either in the USPS’ handling of postal legislative reform or their oversight of the postal service’s public affairs management. For an enterprise that remains an agency of government and the handmaiden of those who truly govern, the postal service seemed to forget who really had the power to ordain its future.

Henderson needs to enjoy the support of his governors and their confidence in his judgment. His interpersonal communication skills are the best the postal service has enjoyed in some time. The governors would be wise to use those skills to their advantage.