No quorum for the Postal Board when USPS needs it most
The U.S. Postal Service holds a unique, if not
special, place in American government. It’s an agency with rules set by
Congress, with a large non-tax revenue stream, much like the National Parks
Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bureau of Land Management. But
unlike those agencies, the USPS must be self-funded, making it look and behave
more like a private business than its peers.
The USPS is run by a board, not a secretary,
which under normal circumstances would allow it to be governed by a group of
postal experts rather than a single political appointee. But USPS governance is
anything but normal; in recent years nominations were slow, confirmations
slower, and the Postal Board of Governors slowly withered until it sat empty in
2018. While prospects improved with the appointment and confirmation of two new
governors, the hopes of a quorum before the end of 2019 or even 2020 get
bleaker by the day.
At a typical agency, the absence of a
secretary might simply shuffle work to an acting secretary and the existing
group of undersecretaries. But USPS procedures are different, as the postmaster
general and deputy postmaster general were tasked with some board
responsibilities when appointments lapsed.
Under such “emergency” leadership, the board still
does not have a quorum and cannot engage the full scope of its authority.
This might not be a problem if the agency simply
needed to keep doing what it was doing. But the USPS has a self-funding mandate
powered by a declining industry. Changes to postal business practices,
including some price adjustments, must be
initiated by the Postal Board, not the USPS or the Postal Regulatory
commission.
Not having a board means the USPS cannot
execute the changes it needs to make to maintain its self-funded status as
people send less mail and more packages.
The changing market calls for frequent
reconsideration of product prices and the scope of different postal product
lines. As a recent report on the USPS to the president notes, now is an
appropriate time to discuss what package products should be considered for
universal service, and what packages should be priced at cost.
Yet the biggest problem for a barely-there Postal
Board is the pending American withdrawal from the UN’s Universal Postal Union.
With only seven months until the U.S. begins to leave the world mail
coordination agency, the USPS must be prepared to set its own rates for inbound
letters and small packages. The postmaster general claims the agency is ready,
but such an unprecedented transition would be easier if the agency had a
complete leadership team in place.
If the USPS is supposed to behave like a
private business, shareholders should work to fill the openings. Given that
Congress and the president have struggled to keep the board filled, they might
find it appropriate to change appointment procedures, either by once again
making the postmaster general more like an agency head, or by otherwise lowering
the bar for Senate confirmation of postal governors. While there would be risk
to changing appointment rules, that risk is outweighed by the risks of
long-term leadership vacuums that the USPS is already facing.
Until the Postal Board is reconstituted, the
agency will struggle to follow through on recommendations like those in the task force report to the
president. Congress may legislate, and the Postal Regulatory Commission may
undertake prescribed rulemaking work. But without enough members to vote, the
Postal Service will stumble forward into a very different post and parcel
business than the one in which it once flourished. Updating rules to make
filling the Postal Board easier would be a radical step. But a radical step
might be better than no step at all, which is the status quo for a Postal Board
that hasn’t had a quorum in years.
