Marketing and first-class mail delivery has all but dried up since the coronavirus pandemic began. Volume in the first week of March declined 30 percent, USPS officials told Congress. By the end of June, the postal service expects volume to be down by 50 percent, and it could lose $23 billion in the next 18 months.
“We are at a critical juncture in the life of the Postal Service,” Megan Brennan, the postmaster general, said in a statement. “At a time when America needs the Postal Service more than ever, the reason we are so needed is having a devastating effect on our business.”
The USPS was set to get a $13 billion grant that wouldn’t have to be repaid, as part of the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package. However, when President Donald Trump found out that relief for the post office was part of the package, he refused to sign it.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told lawmakers that money for the Postal Service could bring the entire bill down, the Washington Post reports, making the choice clear to them: “You can have a loan, or you can have nothing at all.”
Instead, Senators Gary Peters and Ron Johnson added a last-minute $10 billion Treasury Department loan to the Cares Act to keep the agency on firmer ground through the spring of 2020, according to a Democratic committee aide. While Munchkin objected to the loan, it was included in the version that became law.
The $10 billion loan still needs the approval of the Treasury Department. Without it, the post office would be out of luck by September 30, putting the agency in a vulnerable position.
The Cares Act provided $350 billion to the Small Business Administration loan program, $29 billion to passenger airlines and air cargo carriers, and economic incentives for the cruise ship industry, construction, energy, and life sciences industries, among others.
The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Trump refused to help the USPS out for typically selfish reasons – “the Washington Post is mean to him, critical of his many lies, incompetencies, and failures.”
Most people will remember that the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon, and the company does deliver quite a few packages using the postal service, but, then again, so do other online retailers. The Sun-Times says Trump thinks that if he hurts the postal service, he will also hurt Bezos.
Representative Gerald Connolly told the Washington Post, “I’m so frustrated at how difficult it has been for a long time to galvanize attention and action around an essential service. And maybe the pandemic forces us all to refocus on this service and how essential it is and how we need to fix it while we can before it gets into critical condition.”
