Congress and the Biden administration have been very good to the Postal Service: $10 billion in emergency pandemic relief, nearly $50 billion to fix the problems caused by the retiree healthcare benefit mandate, and $3 billion for electric vehicles. You’d think everything would be good for a while and we could stop hearing about the existential crisis facing the Postal Service.
Instead, the Postmaster General continues to call for drastic measures. His Delivering for America plan has already slowed down First Class mail and raised prices across the board, and it will eventually include reducing retail hours, closing post offices, and disposing of historic properties. The PMG is also talking about eliminating 50,000 jobs.
But before he gets around to cutting jobs and degrading the retail network, the Postmaster General wants to completely transform the delivery network. Next month he will begin moving letter carriers from the back of post offices to large facilities called Sorting & Delivery Centers. This promises to be the most massive change in postal operations in decades
