The USPS Continues to Move Away from Mail as it Tries… Banking?

Tax Day 2015 just wrapped up and as Americans all around the country have just finished paying a portion of their hard-earned money over to the federal government, it is discouraging to see what is happening at many of the federal agencies.  There are power grabs, wasteful spending, and in the case of the United States Postal Service (USPS) a continued drive away from the original mission of the organization: delivering the mail.

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) has been a vocal critic of the management of the USPS. First, there was the initiative by the agency to get into the grocery delivery business in a partnership with Amazon. This partnership was based on a trial run of limited grocery delivery without any true accounting of cost or performance, and it also distorted the market and private sector options already available, which are not backed by the government. Next, TPA called out the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) on their leadership and how former PRC Chair Ruth Goldway was taking taxpayer-funded trips around the globe while the agency she was in charge of regulating continued to lose billions of dollars each quarter. Now it seems the USPS is expanding their horizons again, and delving into industries they have no business being a part of when they continue to operate in the red.

In a disturbing trend that seems to be getting worse, some are looking to give the USPS banking powers and expanding on the original mission of the agency to deliver letters. This was an idea championed a year ago by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and it seems to be gaining new traction.

There is really nothing that the Post Office can’t do nowadays, except deliver mail apparently. Grocery delivery was just the beginning, and TPA as well as others have been warning for months that the agency seems undeterred from getting away from the concept of the original mission to deliver mail as they seek to expand services beyond what anyone could even comprehend. Let’s not forget that coupled with this trajectory of expansion into grocery delivery and potentially third party lending is a track record of losing money even as revenue’s from shipping/packaging services have increased. The business model for the USPS has become a convoluted mix of kitchen sink strategies that haven’t gotten the agency out of the loss column, distorted the marketplace, and continued in a direction opposite what the agency was meant to do: deliver the mail.

Sen. Warren seems to believe that the USPS is uniquely positioned to play a role in providing options to those in need.  There are already a number of choices available to Americans and any projected revenues are just that: projected. As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute writes for National Review, this may be part of a larger overall plan to remove private sector players and ensure the government has top-down control on financial services:

Yet financial services for low-income Americans are already being provided by many entrepreneurs in the private sector, and to the extent they are not, it is mostly because of the regulatory burdens from Dodd-Frank and extraconstitutional crackdowns such as the Obama administration’s Operation Choke Point. The new postal plan is the latest chapter in what my Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) colleague Iain Murray has dubbed “Obamaloans” — a scheme that envisions “the regulatory nationalization of the U.S. financial system . . . from top to bottom.”

The goals of Sen. Warren and others not withstanding, this is terrible for taxpayers and the overall economy. The Postal Service was not meant to be a lending agency nor are they equipped to do so, yet there appears to be some who are looking to make that a reality regardless of the cost. This move would signal a further loss of priority for mail delivery and would refocus the goals of the USPS. The question that really needs to be asked is why does the USPS continue to move away from their original mission? How can the agency return to normalcy both in work product and financial stability? Those are the pressing problems for the Post Office, and lawmakers and agency officials should be looking to correct those problems as opposed to creating new ones.

TPA will continue to press for commonsense reforms at the USPS, including ending Saturday delivery, which would save about $2 billion annually. The Post Office should recalibrate and refocus their efforts on the job they were meant to do: deliver mail.