By Lisa Rein. This post originally appeared in the Washington Post.
The U.S. mail is slowing down.
In January, the Postal Service eliminated overnight delivery for local first-class letters that used to arrive the next day. Anywhere from 20 percent to half of the rest of the first-class mail sent every day now takes an extra day of delivery time.
Service standards have been relaxing since 2012, when the volume of first-class overnight mail decreased and that of two-and three-day mail grew. The changes are a response to declining mail volume and the resulting excess capacity in processing plants, and they’ve allowed the financially strapped Postal Service to save $865 million with the closure of a first round of 150 plants and another $750 million by shuttering 82 more starting in January.
The Postal Service calls the delivery changes “Network Rationalization.” To limit the damage for customers and mailers, officials have downplayed the longer delivery times. Asked about the plant closings in January in a speech at the National Press Club a few weeks before his retirement, former postmaster general Patrick Donahoe said that consolidating mail operations into fewer plants would save money and increase efficiency.
“When is the last time you got a piece of mail that had a stamp on it?” Donahoe told reporters. “This whole change represents at most 4 percent of the mail. We think it’s closer to about 2.5 percent. So you can’t hold an entire system hostage and continue to run up debt and continue to avoid making investments over 2 percent to 4 percent of the mail.”
A USPS fact sheet about the new standards, however, says they are affecting up to 16 percent of first-class mail, which is a lot more than Donahoe said. Others, from unions to members of Congress representing rural areas, say the number is much higher. There are many anecdotal reports of delays.
The first round of plant closings did not delay delivery times dramatically, since those plants were situated relatively close together. But the second, more recent round of closings is reverberating more, as trucks drive longer distances to more distant plants to pick up and deliver mail before it goes to local post offices.
Preliminary internal data shows that the Postal Service did not meet even its lower targets for first-class mail during the first seven weeks of 2015, with letters that are supposed to take three days (and four or five days if they’re headed to Alaska or Hawaii) arriving on time just 54 percent to 63 percent of the time.
The numbers show that for the first seven weeks of 2014, service was better: Three- to five-day delivery hovered between 77 percent and 85 percent of agency targets then.
The 2015 numbers, which will be made public in May, follow reports by the Postal Regulatory Commission and the Government Accountability Office, which found that national performance for single-piece first-class mail with 1-day, 2-day, and 3-5 day delivery standards declined throughout fiscal 2014 after a relatively good second quarter in fiscal 2013.
Postal officials have said that severe winter storms had a significant impact on performance results for many service standards, slowing trucks from driving mail to post offices or airports, where it was flown out.
Agency spokeswoman Sue Brennan called the numbers “preliminary” and noted that final information will go to regulators in May, showing improved service in recent weeks.
But she acknowledged that teams of operations experts are now deployed from USPS headquarters in Washington to numerous sites across the country to “help local management with various service issues.”
She declined to say which regions are getting help and, by extension, have the most serious service delays.
“Implementing changes of this magnitude in an organization the size of the Postal Service involves a learning curve,” Brennan said, referring to the plant closings.
“We acknowledge that pockets of the country have experienced some service delays in [January-March],” she said, “much due to the extreme weather but certainly not all. We have deployed headquarters-level operations teams to specific locations to provide on-site assistance with local management.”
The regulatory commission, in a March report on the Postal Service’s performance in fiscal 2014, wrote, “Weather cannot consistently be employed as a catchall excuse for failing to meet performance standards.”
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who serves on the Senate committee that oversees the Postal Service, has long complained that her constituents are not getting mail in three days but in four or five days or longer.
“As service standards have slipped across the country, they’re slipping worse across rural America,” Heitkamp said in an interview. “If you continue to close processing centers … and pretend you’re meeting delivery standards when you’re not, you’re going to get bad service.”
“The three-day delivery standard in and out of rural areas has never been true,” she said.
Don’t close down our processing plants! Service standards will be worse!! Spending more on transportation costs does not save money!
Why not decrease management? Most of the time they are spending it on visiting with other management or personal business.
Just before the end of each fiscal year, when not all of the money has been spent in each department, therefore, they try to spend it on anything just to keep from having their budget cut for the next fiscal year, have an incentive for going under budget and keep the next year’s budget cut at a minimum.
The economics of the community will be worse due to: 1) laying off of the postal workers, 2) some will have to sell their homes and move out of the area, 3) less voters, 4) less spending in the community, 5) decrease in population, 6) less kids growing up to become a contributing members of our community, 7) decrease in school enrollment thus decrease in tax money allocation, 8) decrease in memberships to organizations such as churches, thus decrease in $$.
The powers that be in congress want to privatize the postal service. They have made the usps prefund future retiree health benefits at an unreal percentage that no other company, public or private, must prefund. This fact alone makes it look like the postal service is declining. In truth, the usps is growing in parcel business especially. What the usps needs in positive, NOT negative, reform. They need the prefunding mandate to cease and all delivery standards to go back to pre-2012 levels immediately. The usps is growing and thriving. The American public need and deserve a viable strong postal service!!