Maine letter carriers say Collins paved the way for Trump’s attack on postal service

Years before the Trump administration began instituting cost-cutting measures that has created a national slowdown in mail delivery, Sen. Susan Collins sponsored legislation that Maine letter carriers now say manufactured a financial “crisis” in the U.S. Postal Service that has been used ever since to justify calls for privatization.

In 2005, Collins introduced the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA). In 2006, it became law and required the post office to pay for retirement healthcare benefits for workers 75 years into the future. No other federal agency or private corporation has been saddled with such a massive pre-funding mandate.

“That kind of put us in a hole on paper and made it look like we were losing money,” said Mark Seitz, president of the National Association Letter Carriers, Local 92 union.

“That bill had a few good things in it, but it had a spoiler with this pre-funding mandate,” said John Curtis, a retired letter carrier from Surry who is still active in the Maine State Association of Letter Carriers as their director of education. “She helped set the stage for the current attacks on the postal service.”

Today, the postal service has racked up $160.9 billion in debt. Of that, $119.3 billion is the result of pre-funding retiree benefits.

“She weakened the postal service to the point where people like our president can point to it and say, ‘There’s a crisis here,’” Curtis said.

In its 2018 report, President Donald Trump’s Task Force on the U.S. Postal Service, chaired by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, reaffirmed Collins’ legislation requiring pre-funding of retirement benefits.

“The Task Force does not believe that this general policy should change or that the liability for USPS retiree health benefits should be shifted to the taxpayers,” the task force reported. “The USPS has been losing money for more than a decade and is on an unsustainable financial path.”

The task force report helped fuel the longtime conservative call for privatizing the USPS.

“Collins has never publicly spoken out in favor of privatization. She’s very cautious about that,” said Curtis. “But if you look at her actions, they all trend in that direction.”

Workers worry a weakened USPS is vulnerable to administrative sabotage

Trump’s new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy — a major donor to the president and the Republican Party — has instituted a number of cost-saving measures that have dramatically slowed mail delivery. There is now a days-long backlog of mail across the country.

In Maine, the American Postal Workers Union Local 458 reported that 80,000 pieces of mail were delayed on Monday after a new scheduling rule forced a truck to leave the Southern Maine Processing and Distribution Center in Scarborough at a set time instead of waiting 10 minutes for the mail to be ready.

“Ten minutes is more important than 80,000 letters going out, apparently,” Seitz said. “In wintertime, which is five or six months in Maine, there’s always delays because of weather. With these strict rules, it’s just going to be a downward spiral in service.”

Last Friday, which Congressional Democrats described as a “Friday night massacre,” DeJoy reassigned 23 postal service executives. Critics warn that the administrative reshuffle could give DeJoy more power ahead of the November election, when a record number of mail-in ballots are expected to be cast.

“It’s not good. It’s really not good. It’s scary,” Curtis said.

“A lot of the ballots are definitely going to arrive late,” Seitz said. “That might be planned from the top down to make it look like postal workers aren’t doing our job, so they can keep people away from voting by mail.”

‘It’s not just about saving the postal service. We should be extending service’

Local postal worker unions have called on Sens. Angus King and Collins to support the HEROES Act, a $3 trillion spending package passed by House Democrats in May to address the pandemic and the economic recession. The relief package included $25 billion to prevent the postal service from running out of money before the end of September, the close of the fiscal year.

Collins instead introduced her own legislation in July, offering $25 billion for the postal service with a requirement to provide a long-term financial plan to Congress.

Senate Republicans did not bring the HEROES Act to a vote, but responded with the $1 trillion HEALS Act in late July, which includes no rescue funding for the USPS.

The Republican-led Senate now controls much of the fate of the government’s most popular institution, a service available to everyone, everywhere in the country.

The postal service is one of the biggest employers of people of color and veterans, employing about 3,300 workers in Maine and over 630,000 people nationwide, and it delivers vital services and medicine to the hardest-to-reach rural communities.

“It’s not just about saving the postal service. We should be extending services at this moment,” Curtis said. “We should be doing postal banking, which would be a huge benefit to low-income people who otherwise might be forced to deal with a predatory payday lender.”

In 2015, Curtis travelled to Collins’ office in Washington, D.C. to receive an award for his advocacy for postal workers. He and other union members asked her then to change her position on the pre-funding mandate, as it was clear by then the requirement was pushing the postal service toward financial ruin.

They were unsuccessful.

“I never really had much confidence in the trip, because I think that’s just part of her core being,” Curtis said. “I never really believed that she was really in support of working people.”

Photo: John Curtis, a now-retired letter carrier from Surry, travelled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Sen. Susan Collins in 2015 on behalf of the Maine State Association of Letter Carriers. | courtesy of John Curtis