What Time Does Us Postal Service Close

Even earlier the coronavirus pandemic, the United states of america post office had been atrophying from financial turmoil. Over the past decade, mail offices take been airtight across the country, rural mail delivery is stretched thin, and thousands of mail function workers' positions have been eliminated.

The outgoing postmaster full general recently warned that without immediate back up the bureau could run out of funds within the year, and in that instance might need to close down.

Now, as the nation heads toward an election where millions more Americans are likely to vote past postal service, the agency's crisis could threaten the democratic process. The question for voters is not whether they will exist able to go to the election box, but whether the Postal Service will be able to bring the ballot box to them.

Nevertheless it has faced outright hostility from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly criticized its business agreement with Amazon, which allows the eastward-commerce giant to deliver its packages at a discounted rate. Trump has promised to cake aid for the agency unless information technology quadruples its prices for bundle aircraft, which could cause the visitor to take its business organization elsewhere.

The Postal Service'due south struggles began in the early 2000s. In 2005, Congress imposed an unprecedented thrift measure on the bureau which required USPS to pre-fund retirement benefits 75 years in the future, including for employees who have not fifty-fifty been born yet. No other government agency or corporation operates in such a fashion, and the move left the USPS woefully strapped for funding.

That crisis deepened with the 2008 recession. At first, mail volumes remained high in the early 2000s, even among the ascension of the internet, but the economy took a steep downturn, dealing a huge blow to the advertising post that makes up the USPS's bread and butter. Overall mail service volumes cruel by nearly a third over the following decade, and because the agency doesn't receive any taxpayer coin, the decline placed it in uncharted financial waters.

In the absence of legislative action the USPS has been forced to cut costs where it tin, eliminating more than 200,000 staff positions. This has strained the agency's workforce, specially in rural postal stations and in cities that see large numbers of Amazon packages.

When the Covid-19 virus started to spread through the country'southward major cities in March, the bureau's labor crisis went from bad to worse. Thousands of postal workers took emergency leave to quarantine after contracting the virus or to treat their children. These widespread absences have led to reported delays in post delivery in Ohio and Michigan, fundamental swing states in the upcoming election.

"I'm concerned," said the Autonomous representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who has spearheaded legislation to aid the Mail in the wake of the pandemic, including by offering it a $25bn infusion of cash. "I don't call up it'southward going to cease operations, but [the crisis] could affect operations – at that place could exist delays, there could exist interruptions in commitment, there could be layoffs."

A USPS employee wearing a protective face mask loads mail into a vehicle to be delivered at a post office in Washington DC on 28 April 2020. — A USPS employee wearing a protective face mask loads mail into a vehicle to be delivered at a post function in Washington DC on 28 Apr 2020. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

Meanwhile, Trump has secured near total control of USPS leadership. Concluding month he appointed a Republican fundraiser, Louis DeJoy, to supervene upon the outgoing postmaster general, Megan Brennan, and the following weeks saw resignations by the last ii senior members of the USPS governing board, 1 of whom had overseen the management of mail-in voting, which Trump falsely attributes to the risk of voter fraud.

The leadership of the Postal Service will shortly consist entirely of Trump appointees, and the appointees seem willing to requite in to Trump's demands: the board of governors appear in tardily May that it would review its packet delivery agreements with Amazon.

Steve Hutkins, a professor at New York University who runs the blog Save the Postal service Office, said the consequences of Trump'due south takeover could go far across Amazon. Hutkins said he was concerned DeJoy would implement proposals from a 2018 Trump assistants report, which suggested the USPS should end Sat delivery, shut more stations and reconsider delivering to remote areas. That would affect Nov's election.

"If [DeJoy] were to practise anything similar reduce the frequency of delivery, change postal service processing standards to slow downwardly commitment times, and begin mass closings of post offices, then we could easily be in for significant problems at ballot time," he said. "There's no need to do these things even in good times. They would exist disastrous at a fourth dimension like this."

There'southward another reason why Trump might not want to bail out the Postal Service: voting by mail, which he has repeatedly a criticized. About 30 million voters used such ballots in the 2016 election, and four states now conduct their elections entirely past mail. Millions more than may practise then among fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

The USPS deems absentee ballots "essential mail" and prioritizes delivering them over other items, just Connolly and other Democrats yet worry that even those deliveries will be lost or delayed in the absence of a bailout.

Even so, the biggest threats to a fair election are the routine delivery delays and infrastructure breakdowns that the coronavirus has exacerbated, as they were in Wisconsin's recent primary election.

"You can have an election that's fast, cheap or accurate, and you get to pick two," said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser for elections at the Republic Fund. "If y'all want information technology to be cheap and you don't fund it fully, it'due south not going to be fast. If yous want it to exist inexpensive and fast, and so information technology's not going to be accurate." The Postal Service is more than capable of delivering every ballot, she said, it's simply a question of when information technology delivers them.

The Senate will near certainly pass some form of aid for the Postal Service in the months to come. Only how the USPS will handle the challenge of the 2020 election, especially if a 2d wave of the virus hits the country, is an open question.

The contest for the electoral college is likely to hinge on a scattering of states, some of which, like Florida and Arizona, have loftier rates of mail-in voting already.

In 2016, furthermore, several swing states were decided by razor-thin margins –Trump won Michigan by 13,000 votes, while Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire by two,700 votes.

If the race proves to be similarly shut this time around, it might take days or weeks for the public to figure out who will control the White House – and if the Postal Service proves unable to handle the new demands of post-in balloting, the legitimacy of the ballot might be in doubt.