Trump Can’t Hide His True Reason for Derailing the Post Office

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Taking reporters’ questions on the White House lawn Monday morning about the future of the U.S. Postal Service and mail-in balloting, President Donald Trump dissembled.

“One of the things the post office loses so much money on is the delivering packages for Amazon and these others. Every time they deliver a package, they probably lose three or four dollars,” he said. “That’s not good. They have to raise those prices — OK — not for the people to pay, but for Amazon and those companies to pay.”

Trump has been asserting this for years and it’s not true. Delivering packages provides a handsome revenue boost to the U.S. Postal Service, thanks to e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and others that ship packages in vast truckloads. But package delivery is a small part of the Postal Service’s operation. Mail delivery is its lifeblood, and it has been withering.

A big chunk of the Postal Service’s losses, about $32.6 billion for the fiscal years 2014 through 2019, are also due to a congressional mandate requiring it to prefund future retiree health benefits for its employees — which many other public and private entities don’t have to do. So no, none of these financial problems are caused by package delivery.

There are ways to shore up the Postal Service’s finances, including encouraging its sprawling retail network of post offices to offer more diverse services and become more entrepreneurial. Jacking up the price of postage stamps would also help, but an independent commission sets those prices, not the Postal Service.

All of this is beside the point, for the moment at least. In the first place, the Postal Service isn’t a business. It’s a public service singled out as such in the Constitution. Like the military, public schools, police, firefighters, and the national intelligence and diplomatic corps, it doesn’t operate with traditional private-sector accounting. (If we’re going to have this argument, also remember that the Postal Service’s operating deficits pale in comparison to outfits like the Pentagon, for example, which clocked in $35 trillion in “accounting adjustments” last year alone.)

It’s also beside the point because the real issue at hand is the possible corruption of the November election. Focusing on the Postal Service’s finances in the spring gave Trump cover to settle scores with people he considers enemies, such as Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. Trump is focusing on the Postal Service’s losses now because it provides cover for a push to slow down mail delivery before a presidential election in which mail-in balloting is likely to surge. There’s no secret to his opposition to mail-in voting. Recent polls indicate that those who favor widespread mail-in voting also tend to lean more heavily in favor of his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump has said he’s simply being vigilant because he doesn’t believe the Postal Service is equipped to handle a flood of mail-in ballots. Consider this, however: The Postal Service delivered about 800 million packages and 13 billion pieces of mail between Thanksgiving and New Year’s last year. Even if every one of roughly 130 million voters mailed their ballots this fall, the Postal Service could handle it.

Well, it could handle the volume if roadblocks weren’t in its way. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump megadonor, recently cut back overtime hours for postal workers. A mail slowdown followed. The Postal Service has also taken mail-sorting machines offline. After a social media backlash, the Postal Service said it would stop removing mailboxes from sidewalks (a routine practice it says it has always used to limit clustering and redeploy unused mailboxes).

“Have you ever encouraged Mr. DeJoy to slow the mail, Mr. President?” a reporter asked Trump on Monday. “Have you ever encouraged the postmaster general — a big donor to you — to slow the mail?”

“No, not at all. Wouldn’t do that,” Trump responded. “No, I have encouraged everybody: Speed up the mail, not slow the mail.”

Right. Except Trump told Fox News last Thursday that he wouldn’t release $10 billion Democrats want for the Postal Service because it would allow for “universal mail-in voting.” And the Washington Post reported last week that the Postal Service has already warned 46 states and the District of Columbia that it can’t guarantee that all mail-in ballots cast for the November election will arrive in enough time to be counted.

“I signed an absentee ballot. Absentee ballots are great. They work. They’ve been proven. They’re good — like in Florida,” Trump said on Monday. “But this universal mail-in is a very dangerous thing. It’s fraught with fraud and every other thing that can happen, and we have to be very, very careful. … Absentee ballots are great. They’ve worked for a long time. And I — I totally endorse absentee ballots.”

For all practical purposes there isn’t any difference between mail-in ballots and absentee ballots. There’s also no truth to Trump’s repeated claim that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. And he clearly thinks voting by mail is fine in Florida, where he now resides, but nowhere else.

Alarm bells have been ringing about the Postal Service’s fate for months, and they grew louder in recent days. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the House back into session this Saturday to vote on billions in fresh funding for the service and to pass legislation blocking some of DeJoy’s recent maneuvers. But the Senate has no such plans of its own. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he thinks the Postal Service “is going to be just fine.”

Attorneys general from several states are also pondering suing the Trump administration and the Postal Service to stop mail service from becoming derailed. A group of individual voters and candidates for public office in New York sued Trump, DeJoy and the Postal Service in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, seeking adequate funding for postal operations in anticipation of a surge in mail-in voting.

But the courts may not be able to move quickly on any of this and may not be the proper venue for resolving the problem anyhow, says Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in election law. Persily also helps oversee the Healthy Elections Project, a joint effort supported by Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that’s trying to ensure that the 2020 election is shielded from anything that might undermine its integrity.

“Lawsuits are not the way to go here. What’s the remedy?” he asks. “If there’s actual political manipulation to deprive people’s right to vote, then you have a real civil-rights claim. But the better way to go is for local officials to work with their local post offices to make sure that the materials are being received and sent out on time.”

Voters may have to rescue themselves this time. If there are huge delays ahead, then they’ll have to register to vote as soon as possible, request their ballots soonest if they don’t receive them automatically, and make sure to return them even faster.

That way, perhaps, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night — nor Trump — will stay their ballots from completing their appointed rounds.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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