This may be a naive question, even a dumb one, but I’m truly curious. Instead of going for drop-in-the-bucket solutions, why is the Postmaster General not going in front of the cameras and talking about the main problem, which seems to be prefunding of benefits? Backroom deals, or something?
Door Delivery
Small rural and far suburban post offices
Periodicals class
Non profit organization postage rates
Rural delivery extension
City Delivery post office box service
What you have with all off these items are politically potent constituencies who are sufficiently influential to get Congress to PROHIBIT CHANGE ~ in order to keep a service beneficial only to them which had been established under the former Post Office department.
I"d add Zone 12 but it's not as important as it used to be.
The financial and resources balancing acts to maintain sufficient cross subsidization to keep these things going is literally mind-numbing. Here I have been retired for 8 years and BINGO I'm still able to argue the case on every single one of them ~ not quite mind-numbing, but haunting!
The USPS is usually able to keep its expenses within 2% of its income ~ month after bone tired month for years on end ~ and yet the 2006 Senate decided that they could make a show of reducing the deficit by taking $5.3 billion per year from USPS.
That hit them upside the head with an oil-soaked 2X4 ~ and it's not been the same since that time.
This is the prefunding for retiree medical insurance benefits 75 years from now!
That the Senate acted in total ignorance is pretty obvious, but when informed they made no effort to correct their problem. I believe a couple of their members thought a privatized USPS would arise out of the wreckage. Yet, even if you could privatize the mails that list of problem areas I provided above would still exist ~ and the cross subsidization would need to be continued in some manner.
The current postal management has proposed several different plans for eliminating the cross subsidization problems, in part. Nobody has ever proposed a comprehensive program for fixing them ~ except me ~ and I retired ~ and don't give a darned either way at the moment. The Republicans imagine it's a union problem ~ yet the cross-subsidization involves a good $35billion ~ you'd need to whack clerk/carrier salaries by more than 50% to get that kind of savings. The Democrats imagine it's a public service problem ~ yet they figure as long as the Postal Rate Commission can get away with stiffing the rate payers there's no sense stirring up the hen house.