The logo of U.S.-based Christian charity World Vision is seen on a car parked outside their offices in Jerusalem, August 4, 2016. And Amazon, as we know, is heavily reliant on the United States Postal Service to deliver many of its packages all across the country. The agency projects those numbers could keep dropping, leading to a loss of $23 billion over the next 18 months. That changed in 1971, when Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act , turning it into an independent, self-sustaining agency. By Friday, a hashtag, #SaveThePostOffice, was trending nationally on Twitter. Surveillance. The public can also rent post office boxes, obtain passport applications and purchase money orders there. Right, and if you weren’t there, what would happen to those packages? Today, postal employees must cope with an ever-increasing avalanche of mail which, in the past decade, has quadrupled in volume. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File) David Goldman The âPost Office,â or the United States Postal Service, is owned by the United States Federal Government. Mr. Johnson, who had previously supported allocating funds to prop up the agency, said that data received by his staff suggested actual revenues from mid-March to mid-April were down less than 6 percent compared to the year before. According to information uploaded by WHO, voluntary donations from member states (such as the US) contribute 35.41%, assessed contributions are 15.66%, philanthropic organisations account for 9.33%, UN organisations contribute about 8.1%; the rest comes from myriad sources. He wasn’t family, but he was close, you know what I mean? You can now glimpse the future with nothing more than a modem, a phone line, and a few dollars a month. Like any non-profit, it must have enough income to cover expenses. The U.S. The post office performs many different mail functions including receiving it, handling it and delivering it. By any definition of socialism that I understand, if it is paid for by the taxpayer, it is a socialist institution. Absolutely. The scholarship covers tuition fee, accommodation fee, monthly stipends, and I know I’ve read some things about us not charging enough for some of the package business, but the Postal Service is not a for-profit private company like some of the others. What do you think that the rationale is? Some other influential Republicans who had been supportive of a bailout appear to be backing away, accusing both the Postal Service and Democrats of making the situation sound more dire than it is. Sullivan was, not too long ago, actually, at the White House. It would be doing fine today had the government not allow some of the biggest revenue sources (FedEx for overnight and UPS for Amazon) be taken away from it. Wow. And that’s what has contracted at an alarming rate. Postal Service (USPS) is a large business enterprise operated by the federal government. It’s self-sustainable. And so we saw in March, when Congress was racing to put together the CARES Act, its big $2 trillion relief bill to try and prop up the economy, Democrats and Republicans get kind of a handshake deal to send it $13 billion in direct funding that will help it keep operating through the summer and the fall, and hopefully weather the worst of the crisis. Few details of the talks have become public, but a task force led by Mr. Mnuchin in 2018 proposed that the Postal Service raise its rates, begin diverting more work to non-unionized outside contractors, and essentially lease space in the nation’s mailboxes to private delivery services. Postal business is transacted through some 47,000 post offices, contract stations, and branches in 42,000 U.S. communities. Today is National Voter Registration Day! The agency, which makes its money on the sale of postage and other products that have declined in popularity since the advent of email and online billing, has not relied on taxpayer funding for decades, instead issuing debt as losses have mounted. ... After Declaration of Independence, US Post Office Is Born. President Trump, as is his prerogative, named in recent weeks a new postmaster general, not somebody that comes from within the agency, but is a Republican donor who comes from private business. Without a financial rescue from Congress, they have warned, an agency that normally runs without taxpayer funds could run out of cash as soon as late September, raising the specter of bankruptcy and an interruption in regular delivery for millions of Americans. — that other states might be like, “Oh wait, why can’t you just drive there?” Well, you guys all know why we can’t just drive there — because so many of our communities don’t even have roads. The White House position has increasingly vocal allies in Congress. Though 90 percent of its income is derived from the sale of stamps, the post office is also the largest savings bank in the country, and the largest agency with a transfer of money. I urge my colleagues to adopt. Post Office branches, along with the Royal Mail delivery service, were formerly part of the General Post Office and after 1969, the Post Office corporation. My parents knew him. The founding fathers I don’t think ever meant for it to be that, according to what I’ve read. Paul Ratje/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. The mail carrier that came through, we were always right there to see him, and he’d give me a little piece of candy, or a piece of bubble gum, or something that we don’t do now, by any means. He’s of the opinion that Amazon is basically ripping off the Postal Service. “Their goal has always been to privatize, to make a profit off the Postal Service for private purposes,” Ms. Pelosi added, referring to Republicans. I feel like that’s something a lot of people don’t quite understand. On Wednesday, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and the chairman of the committee overseeing the Postal Service, requested a more detailed account of its finances. Postal Service officials are seeking a $75 billion bailout from taxpayers. And what’s your sense of how the Postal Service is doing in this moment? And here, basically the whole world and the economy shuts down overnight, and there’s a precipitous decline — 5 percent a first, 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent — of overall mail volume. The Postal Service, On The Verge Of Collapse, Is Begging For Funding. Mnuchin wants more not only rate increases, but increases where Amazon would essentially have to pay more. “I recognize how important the Postal Service is to my state, and I’m not going to let anything happen to it that would jeopardize the ability of the mail to reach all of you.”. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution. So the president has specifically linked his reluctance to assist the Postal Service financially with his frustrations with Amazon and Jeff Bezos. ELI5: If the US Post Office is funded by the government, why do they charge us to ship something from them? And so the Postal Service begins to put together projections that say, if these trends continue, we could be looking at a volume in mail decline by half by the middle of the summer. And so while the Postal Service was not set up to be a kind of moneymaking engine for the government, it did, for much of its modern life, either break even or make modest profits based on the sale of postage. Postal Service. And it decides that the Postal Service ought to set aside money in advance to fund the health care benefits of all of its retirees. Everyone would feel the absence of the U.S. Postal Service -- especially in a pandemic. Take Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska. And the other thing to keep in mind that the president’s comments often obscure is that these contracts with companies like Amazon, while they are secretive, or we, the public, haven’t seen them, they are certified to be profitable. So businesses are spending less money on mail, individuals are spending less money, and the Postal Service, saddled with this new obligation to fund its retirees health care well into the future, and battling a recession that any business was struggling with at that time, finds itself very quickly moving further and further into the red. It was one of the original functions of Government, mentioned in the Constitution. Yet because the Postal Service technically operates under the executive branch, and President Donald Trump has displayed a bizarre hostility to it since taking office, it seems likely that the agency will receive some pushback. Tap here to turn on desktop notifications to get the news sent straight to you. It takes in more than $1.5 billion annually. When President Trump went off on a riff against the Postal Service and about how they were being ripped off by Amazon —. The postage rate was based on the number of sheets in the letter and the distance it would travel. All rights reserved. But he wants to be able to look at those contracts himself and make sure that they are meeting, I suppose, his standard for what that ought to look like. I mean, the White House is saying, take this loan. This is “The Daily.”. So while the Post Office is privileged under U.S. law (it has a monopoly on the delivery of first-class mail, for example), it's not technically run by the government nor is it funded by taxpayers. By 2009, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s nonpartisan watchdog agency, determined that the Postal Service’s business model was no longer sustainable. So it actually starts with The Washington Post, the newspaper that the president feels has covered him too critically, too unfairly. Email? So Nick, I have to imagine if that financial crisis hurts the Postal Service, that this one that’s now underway has just clobbered them. 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