The James A. Farley Post Office Building in New York City. Inscribed above the columns is the postal creed: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” (Photo: Creative Commons)
When I was boy, I picked up two habits from my father: watching for the mail, and watching the weather.
We lived at the end of a street, so on a Saturday, when we heard the postal truck doing a U-turn in front of our house, we knew it was time to fetch the mail. “Never let it get cold in the mailbox,” my dad used to say, only half jokingly.
After I became a stamp collector and a shortwave radio listener, the two hobbies fed each other. I would write to radio stations I had heard and request their verification cards. Then I would eagerly watch the mail for the postcards and stamps from faraway countries.
Mail delivery was one of life’s sacred constants during my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s. I can’t remember a time when the weather ever interfered with it. The Postal Service creed rang true: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
Government weather forecasting was another constant. As a boy, I tuned in to NOAA Weather Radio for the latest watches and warnings. There was something comforting about the thought that National Weather Service meteorologists were monitoring the skies for hazards 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Sadly, the idea that mail delivery and weather forecasting are sacred public trusts has come under sustained assault in the Trump Administration.
The latest allegations against Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—that as CEO of New Breed Logistics he reimbursed employees to make political donations to Republican candidates—have only heightened the stench of an appointment that reeked of conflict of interest from the start.
According to an investigation by the New York Times, DeJoy still holds at least a $30 million stake in XPO Logistics, which acquired New Breed in 2014. That’s despite the fact that XPO benefits from contracts with the Postal Service.
President Trump’s motivations in appointing DeJoy apparently included political patronage (Trump attended a high-dollar fund-raiser at DeJoy’s home in North Carolina in 2017) and the G.O.P. idea that private-sector executives know better how to get things done than career public servants.
But far from creating efficiencies, DeJoy’s cost-cutting, including the removal of hundreds of letter-sorting machines, has slowed delivery times, raising the suspicion that he is starving the agency he was hired to lead. Though recent public outcry led him to reverse some of the measures until after the election, he may already have inflicted long-term damage.
The choice of DeJoy as postmaster general is remarkably similar to Trump’s nomination in 2017 of Barry Lee Myers, CEO of AccuWeather, as NOAA administrator. Three of the agency’s former heads opposed Myers, who had lobbied for legislation that would have limited NOAA’s ability to compete with AccuWeather’s for-profit forecasting products.
Ironically, as journalist Michael Lewis pointed out, AccuWeather’s predictions depended heavily on raw data gathered by NOAA. Yet in a hearing before Congress in 2013 on the nation’s forecasting infrastructure, Myers downplayed the federal role. “The [private] weather industry has innovated in ways the government could not nor should be expected to do,” he said.
Myers’s lauding of private sector innovation ignored a fundamental ethical question: Should vital weather information be anything other than public property, freely available to all? A similar question can be asked about mail delivery. Though the Postal Service receives no tax dollars for its operating expenses, Congress regulates postal rate increases—and with good reason. Affordable, reliable mail service is a public good. Many Americans in rural areas depend on the Postal Service for delivery of medicine and other essentials because commercial shippers don’t deliver to post office boxes or remote addresses. And in rural areas without broadband, residents count on NOAA Weather Radio, rather than AccuWeather’s premium forecasting products, for storm warnings.
In the end, Congress balked at Myers’s nomination, which stalled in the Senate for more than two years. President Trump withdrew the nomination at Myers’s request in December 2019. Congress should again assert its oversight authority and keep up the pressure on DeJoy until he resigns.
On a more basic level, it’s time to reclaim the idea that mail delivery and weather forecasts should be the common property of citizens in our republic. For starters, this will require new federal support. Congress may also need to curb the president’s freedom to appoint administrators with no experience in the agencies they seek to lead. Myers, had he been confirmed, would have been only the second NOAA administrator in the agency’s four-decade history who lacked a science degree. DeJoy is one of just five postmasters general to come from the private sector since the Postal Service became an independent federal agency (rather than a cabinet department) in 1971.
To be sure, agencies such as the Postal Service have suffered from political entanglements before, though past controversies look quaint compared to the blatant politicization we see today. President Franklin Roosevelt was a lifelong stamp collector, and after he died in 1945, it came out that his collection included some rare die proofs of stamps that he had received as “gifts” from postal employees. Critics charged that the proofs were government property. The flap followed a 1935 controversy in which Postmaster General James Farley, an FDR appointee, had issued a small number of imperforate stamps, later known as “Farley’s Follies,” which he purchased and then gave as gifts to FDR, knowing that their value would rapidly appreciate. After Congress began looking into the matter, “the petty graft was stopped,” as the Chicago Tribune later put it.
Oddly enough, it was FDR’s own reverence for stamps that got him into hot water. Tending his stamp collection was one of his favorite ways to unwind in the White House. A 1933 newspaper article reported that stamps had “a sacred quality” for him.
If only we could bottle that reverence and administer it to our current president. The mail, like weather forecasting, ought to be above politics. President Trump’s sordid effort to undermine both has struck a blow to services that all Americans should be able to take for granted.
© 2020 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Further Reading
Catie Edmondson, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Luke Broadwater, “DeJoy Pressured Workers to Donate to G.O.P. Candidates, Former Employees Say,” New York Times, September 6, 2020; Luke Broadwater and Catie Edmondson, “Postal Service Has Paid DeJoy’s Former Company $286 Million Since 2013,” New York Times, September 2, 2020; and Lucy Tompkins, “Who Is Postmaster General Louis DeJoy?” New York Times, September 2, 2020. On Barry Lee Myers, see Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 165-66; and Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 170-72.