USPS must be broken in two, argues Brookings paper
In a newly-published paper, Brookings scholar Elaine Kamarck has argued that the US Postal Service (USPS) “must be broken into two separate entities”. In Delaying the inevitable: Political stalemate and the U.S. Postal Service, Kamarck warned that the USPS “faces a wide assortment of problems that threaten its survival”. She also maintained that its fundamental problem is that it is “expected to compete with the private sector, but yet is stifled by law and saddled with a governance structure that impedes innovation”.
The USPS, added Kamarck, is “neither a fully public nor a fully private organization” – and so it falling between two stools. Hence, Kamarck’s proposals to split the Postal Service in two.
“One organization should be a public sector organization with the sole mission of delivering on the universal mandate of delivering mail service to all Americans,” said Kamarck. “The other organization should be privatized so that it is out from under the laws and regulations that make innovation and flexibility all but impossible.”
Kamarck went on to lists the various questions Congress “must answer in order to fully address all of the challenges currently preventing the USPS’s viability”. These were:
- Does the Federal government still want to be committed to universal service?
- If the political decision is to keep universal service then the question must be asked: What is universal service in the information age?
- Is it possible to innovate and create even more efficiencies in pursuit of the universal mandate?
- Can USPS develop new products and compete in the private marketplace? Are USPS leaders being distracted from the core mission of universal service by their attempts at expansion into other endeavors? Are USPS leaders and managers capable of the kind of innovation needed to compete in the private market?
- If USPS competes more with the private sector, what is the actual US government subsidy and are there ways to compensate for that?
- Will Congress let the USPS compete?
Kamarck concluded: “Redefining the universal mandate for an information age will allow the United States to preserve its federal postal organization, and privatizing the rest of the organization will allow for fair competition in an already robust marketplace.”
As previously reported, Senator Tom Carper last week introduced his the Improving Postal Operations, Service, and Transparency Act of 2015 (iPOST) bill in the US Senate.
Click here to access a download of Elaine Kamarck’s paper.
