By Chris Satullo
Mailing it in has long been an idiom to describe a half-hearted effort. But the phrase is having a moment.
These days, to Donald Trump and his Kool-Aid Brigade, mailing it in conjures dastardly images of massive election fraud. But during the virtual Democratic convention, mailing it in – meaning it as in your election ballot – took on the aura of a valiant, dragon-slaying, democracy-saving deed.
Suddenly, the U.S. Postal Service – long seen by some as the dowdy maiden aunt of federal government, kindly thought of but decidedly out of touch – is suddenly at the hot center of political controversy.
My mission today is not to parse the ins and outs of whether Trump really has his crony, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, ginning up a slowdown in mail handling and delivery to suppress mail-in balloting and steal an election. Suffice it to say two things about that:
- Democrats have good reason to be anxious about some ballots in big Democratic cities being dawdled into illegitimacy by a postal slowdown, but the level of certitude and hysteria about this alleged plot displayed during the convention was a bit over the top.
- Democratic voters: No matter how evil and omnicompetent you imagine DeJoy to be, you have it in your power to thwart him. Just obtain, fill out and mail in your ballot by Oct. 15 and you’ll be fine. Procrastination is the Gaslighter-in-Chief’s friend, so avoid it.
But my goal here is to make a different, simple point – one vital to understanding what’s been going in Washington for decades, but one that still eludes many Americans. It is this:
When modern congressional Republicans attack a government program or department as ineffective, costly, riddled with waste and generally a carbuncle on the hide of the Republic, it’s a good bet the allegations are a crock.
It’s far more likely that the program achieves its mission fairly well and is popular with the public. The GOP troops attack it not because it’s no good; they attack it because it works.
So it is with the Postal Service.
Modern Republicans train their most unremitting fire on programs that prove the federal government can get big things done, can serve the public good at a massive scale and gain public buy-in. (The USPS has a 91 percent positive rating in one recent poll). Another favorite GOP gambit is to work overtime to undermine and underfund such powerhouse initiatives, so that conservative politicians can then trot out some negative anecdotes or stats to hyperventilate about.
Why do they do this? Because too many on the right side of the aisle in Congress are ideologues funded by the most virulently anti-government precincts of corporate America. They want government to fail, to be incompetent – because competent government gives the lie to their ideology.
Social Security is an extraordinary success that has slashed poverty among the elderly and enabled millions to retire comfortably. Yes, it faces some demographic and actuarial challenges as Baby Boomers like me turn gray and think about hanging it up. But have you noticed that the imminent collapse of the program that entitlement Cassandras have been predicting for the past 30 years never seems to arrive? These fiscal hawks are like the apocalyptic prophets who keep predicting new dates for the end of the world.
In fact, Social Security’s finances can and will be stabilized with a few tweaks – such as steadily raising the income ceiling for the payroll tax and slowly increasing the full retirement age.
Medicare is more of a fiscal basket case, as Boomers live longer and soak up more medical services in their very Boomeresque quest never to die. But a fix lies in changing some of the perverse incentives embedded in the program’s outmoded reimbursement schemes – e.g., paying out for chemo and invasive procedures for terminal cancer, while shortchanging hospice. Try to make this type of repair to Medicare, though, and Republicans will emit ludicrous howls about “death panels.” They don’t want the patient cared for; they want it dead.
The same with the Affordable Care Act, a law which would have had fewer flaws if Barack Obama had not twisted himself into a pretzel futilely trying to get at least one GOP senator to vote for it. (Susan Collins, enjoy your enforced retirement in 2021.) The ACA is a classic case of congressional Republicans doing everything they could to sabotage a law (underfunding it, clawing out key aspects via court challenges), then chastising the program for problems they themselves engineered.
Luckily for the 20 million Americans still enjoying coverage thanks to the ACA, these apostles of incompetence were too feckless and ill-informed about health-care economics to conjure up their long-promised replacement bill.
The list of programs that have gotten this treatment in the last three decades goes on and on: alternative energy, urban school reform, gun-violence prevention, etc.
And the post office.
Somehow, huge chunks of the public that are harmed by this policy sabotage continue to applaud it. It’s almost as if Ronald Reagan had been able to implant a device in their brains that zings them with this message every hour on the hour: Government is not the solution; it’s the problem.
The triumph of this trick – i.e. casting government as a malignant Other, rather than what Abraham Lincoln saw it as, the vehicle for the people to take action for the common good – was captured in a famous line from 2009. Remember when angry Tea Partiers swarmed congressional town meetings to blast the idea that became the ACA? During one California session, a person shouted out: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
Got a really firm grasp of the deal, don’t you, pal?
This potent, sown confusion about who’s really on your side and who’s not is very much still abroad in the land. So is this canard, which congressional Republicans regularly trot out as they starve government programs and invite their corporate pals to feast on the remains:
We need to run government more like a business.
I always want to ask: Which business is that? Wells-Fargo, ritually defrauding customers by charging them for bank accounts they didn’t request and didn’t know they had? BP, fouling the Gulf of Mexico with its negligence at Deepwater Horizon? V-W, with its bald-faced lies about its cars’ mileage? Equifax, opening our sensitive financial data up to hackers? Uber, mistreating its female staff and screwing its drivers? Facebook, smiling blandly and issuing vague promises to do better as it coddles hate groups and injects a stream of toxins into our democracy?
Run it more like a business…That’s Postmaster-General DeJoy’s mantra as he cancels overtime, mothballs sorting machines and tells his people to let those bags of mail out on the dock gather a little dust.
I suspect DeJoy would be doing some of these same things even if his boss were not seized by counterfactual fever dreams about mail-in ballot fraud. Where DeJoy comes from in the corporate world, cutting costs, shaving staff and reducing service to the edge of unacceptable are deemed the chief managerial virtues. It’s what you do to show you’re worthy of the corner office and the big bucks.
Of course, what he’s running right now is not some failing business. It’s a constitutionally- mandated public service that still plays a vital role in the life of rural America, still provides needed services to veterans, seniors and small businesses. And, to repeat, rates as Americans’ favorite public agency, with a bipartisan favorability rating of 91 percent in a recent Pew Research Center poll.
But what about those USPS deficits you hear so much about? Don’t they indicate a failing operation that has failed to adjust to the digital age?
Well, remember that page from the GOP playbook? If you have a government agency that’s popular and doing well, do not tolerate that dangerous state of affairs. It might reflect well on the party that believes in government, the blue one. So, throw a roadblock or two in the agency’s path. For the USPS, this came in the form of a 2006 bill (introduced by a Republican – though, to be fair, passed with some Democratic votes) that made USPS one of the rare government agencies required to prepay entirely for its pension and health benefits, with no reliance on the vast U.S. Treasury to pick up the slack.
Yes, the post office struggles to meet challenges in the digital age. But this law is like a lead weight tied to the leg of a swimmer trying to reach the safety of the shore.
A tendency lingers in some quarters to regard Donald Trump’s flabbergasting incompetence merely as an outlier, an unfortunate trait of one incumbent. This lets the national GOP off too lightly.
Planned, intentional incompetence has been the national party’s governing strategy at least since the days of Reagan. It is a chronic case of partisan calculation trumping public responsibility. The U.S. Postal Service is just the latest high-profile victim.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.