Republicans want privatization, Trump wants to stick it to Amazon.
The U.S. Postal Service, like many American businesses, is suffering from sharply declining demand due to the coronavirus crisis: Last week, members of Congress were informed that it will “run out of cash” in September without federal assistance.
Congressional Democrats have largely been amenable to this request, adding USPS funding to their list of priorities for a fourth coronavirus relief bill.
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, remain narrowly focused on putting more money into the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses — and are opposed to broadening the scope of what will be considered in the next bill.
But the Trump administration also appears to be specifically hostile to the idea of a Postal Service bailout. Its distaste for a postal bailout merges ideological conservatives’ generic preference for postal privatization with the president’s hang-up about the idea that the USPS is giving Amazon a sweetheart deal on shipping.
In general, there are a lot of complexities to the long-term postal policy picture in the United States, but the immediate crisis is actually pretty simple: Mail volumes are plunging, taking USPS revenue down with them. And unless something is done relatively quickly to make up for those lost revenues, it’s hard to see how significant layoffs and service reductions can be avoided…
To read the entire article from Vox, click https://www.vox.com/2020/4/12/21218151/usps-bailout-privatization-amazon-trump
