Rethink USPS’ core mission

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Updated: January 15, 2012 8:03AM

Considering the sheer magnitude of the U.S. Postal Service’s financial problems, we wonder if it isn’t time to ask the formerly unthinkable question: Has the Postal Service outlived its usefulness?

The agency proposes closing roughly 250 of the nearly 500 processing centers nationwide (including eight in Indiana) and about 3,700 local post offices and, in the process, reducing 100,000 employees.

Those are big cuts but not nearly enough for an agency in danger of defaulting on a $5.5 billion annual payment to the U.S. Treasury for retiree health benefits and expected to have a record loss of $14.1 billion next year. There is a growing sense the USPS merely will be postponing the inevitable, no matter what it does. It likely will accelerate the slide: As it offers poorer service at greater cost, more people will use alternatives such as email and private carriers.

A small and shrinking percentage of the population does not have access to USPS alternatives. Surely there should be a discussion of better ways to serve that group than with the massive and expensive system now in place. A reorganized, slimmed-down USPS would be one option, as would letting out bids to private contractors. Just letting the agency go should be on the table, too.

Private carriers offer comparable rates for package delivery; why suppose they couldn’t handle letters and other mail just as well?

We turn to government for those things that can’t be done any other way. That no longer applies to the mail, but history and habit make it hard for us to see that.

— (Fort Wayne) News-Sentinel