A Letter From The Chairman, Apr. 19, 1976

This past December 1 began a dialogue with the White House on the Postal Service. Parts of that dialogue were reported in these columns, and since then a flood of editorials and news stories, congressional debate and public discussion, changes in the U.S. Postal Service—actual or threatened—have made the post office a fiercely hot subject.

Since the Publisher’s Letter was opened to the subject before, I believe this seems the appropriate place and moment for a brief report on what has happened.

Very possibly we are seeing the beginning of some consensus on how to maintain the Postal Service. At least I am struck by the fact that knowledgeable people who may have dissimilar points of view on other matters have lately expressed remarkably similar ideas about the postal dilemma.

Senator Barry Goldwater (R., Ariz.), in an unusually wide-ranging article scheduled for the May issue of the Notre Dame Journal of Legislation, raises the question of how “a political conservative who ordinarily is skeptical of more public spending” can support postal appropriations that the White House opposes. The Senator answers with six detailed reasons, the final one being that “free speech, and all that means to the general public and our way of life, is truly involved.” Noting “the historic role of the public mails as promoting public enlightenment and the security of a free people,” Senator Goldwater concludes that “this end is deserving of the support of all who support freedom.”

James Rademacher, the president of the Letter Carriers union, agrees with Senator Goldwater—on that. In a recent letter to the White House, Mr. Rademacher also argued for the appropriations or the public service subsidies that are necessary to maintain postal service. “It seems to be a modern fallacy,” he observed, “that says the post office should pay its own way … Does the Department of Commerce?”

In his letter to the White House, Mr. Rademacher expressed his fear that without a substantial postal subsidy, “the postal establishment is going down the drain.” That echoes the concern of the chairman of the House Postal Service Subcommittee, James Hanley (D., N.Y.), who in a recent insertion in the Congressional Record said that those who continue to be against public service subsidies “will either purposefully or inadvertently lead the Postal Service to ruin.”

Congressman Hanley summed up his experience of a decade in dealing with the postal problem: “It is wishful thinking to believe that we can continue the kind of service we have enjoyed and which has been remarkably beneficial to the country without providing substantial funds from the general treasury. To be sure we must ferret out waste, and we cannot tolerate slipshod management. But money will still be needed over and above that generated by postal rates.”

Last month in the Senate, the chairman of the Post Office and Civil Service Committee, Gale McGee (D., Wyo.), bluntly condemned resistance to increased “subsidies to the

Postal Service, which desperately needs those subsidies.” Earlier the Senator had warned his colleagues that without those subsidies the Postal Service would be “fragmented and struggling for survival.”

Some enthusiasts have suggested private industry as a Moses to lead us out of the postal wilderness. This suggestion also produces a striking identity of opinion about the modern Moses’ chances.

Goldwater: “Should postage costs continue to increase, private delivery systems may become feasible in certain parts of metropolitan areas, but will remain doubtful for use in rural areas, small towns or many apartment houses.”

Rademacher: “Those who advocate turning over the postal operation to private enterprise . .. are particularly misled, because they simply do not understand the mission of our Postal Service, or postal economics.”

Hanley: “First the Administration starves the Postal Service of the funds necessary to do its job, then it disingenuously suggests that private enterprise be allowed to step in. I admire private enterprise, have worked in it or with it all my life, and realize that it can do a good job of delivering the mail for some of the people. But not all of the people, and that is what the Postal Service is all about.”

McGee: “Allowing private companies to compete with the Postal Service in the delivery of first-class mail would signal the end of the Postal Service as a national institution, for the private firms would take over the profitable delivery areas, leaving delivery to remote and rural areas to the Postal Service.”

These four knowledgeable gentlemen are quoted at some length because I suspect their recent statements are not just straws in the wind. They probably indicate which way the wind is blowing. There are, of course, cp,un-tering breezes, and I do not mean to suggest any lack of opposition to their viewpoint (on postal matters any position taken by anyone is immediately opposed by someone). It is rather certain, in fact, that even these four experts would disagree on parts of any proposed overall solution to the postal problem.

It seems worth noting, however, that all four agree on certain fundamentals: (1) the necessity of public service appropriations to maintain the post office, (2) the danger of chopping up the Postal Service and giving pieces of it to private enterprise, (3) the immediacy of the threat to the existence of the post office, and (4) the importance of the Postal Service as the underpinning which helps bind our diverse nation together.