Hello All:
I'm seeing a growing number of articles like the one attached from the
Washington Post, concerned over the potential shut down of the US Post
Office. I can think of many serious consequences, not the least of
which, for the blind, is our "Free Matter for the Blind" status, and
for the public in general is the matter of voting by mail. What has
our organization's leadership discussed regarding this looming crisis.
Carl Jarvis
From the Washington Post
By
Jacob Bogage
April 11, 2020 at 8:41 a.m. PDT
Through rain, sleet, hail, and even a pandemic, mail carriers serve
every address in the United States, but the
coronavirus
crisis is shaking the foundation of the U.S. Postal Service in new
and dire ways.
The Postal Service’s decades-long financial troubles have worsened
dramatically, as the volume of the kind of mail that pays the agency’s
bills — first-class
and marketing mail — has withered during the pandemic. The USPS needs
an infusion of money, and President Trump has blocked potential
emergency funding
for the agency that employs around 600,000 workers, repeating instead
the false claim that higher rates for Internet shipping companies
Amazon, FedEx and
UPS would right the service’s budget.
Trump threatened to veto the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and
Economic Security Act, or Cares Act, if the legislation contained any
money directed
to bail out the postal agency, according to a senior Trump
administration official and a congressional official who, like others
in this report, spoke
on the condition of anonymity.
“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign
the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it,” the Trump
administration official
said. “I don’t know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not
going to sign it, and we told them that.”
Instead, Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) 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.
Lawmakers originally agreed to a $13 billion direct grant the Postal
Service would not have to repay. That effort was blocked by Treasury
Secretary Steven
Mnuchin, who warned such a move could blow up the relief bill. A
committee aide said Mnuchin told lawmakers during negotiations: “You
can have a loan,
or you can have nothing at all.”
