I carried the mail. Postmaster General DeJoy should be returned to sender.

I would have never passed my 90-day probationary period with the U.S. Postal Service in 1980 if I had mishandled the mail as badly as Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has in just two months this year.

But I passed, and went on to carry mail for 20 years before going to graduate school and embarking on a second career as a historian. I survived first my clerk and later my letter carrier probation as my colleagues did by heeding the institutional memory embedded in both formal and informal training: “Protect the sanctity of the mail,” get the mail out, never leave first-class behind, and “do it for the good of the service.” Management sometimes used that last phrase as a command, but overall, we all felt like we were on the same team with the same goal.

I learned a lot carrying mail. No matter what kind of day I was having, wearing the postal uniform made me accountable to the public for whatever issue they had with their mail, even if it did not directly connect to me.

I also heard about the postal workers in 1970 who risked their careers and even fines and jail terms to conduct an illegal wildcat strike that won the good wages, benefits and full collective bargaining rights we enjoyed. The strike produced a bipartisan compromise between President Nixon and Congress known as the Postal Reorganization Act (Title 39) that reorganized the U.S. Post Office Department into the USPS as a self-supporting government agency/business hybrid.

It took a politically manufactured (but very real) financial crisis in 2009 to slowly choke the USPS that was earning annual revenue surpluses. It was the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) that handcuffed the USPS into paying $5.5 billion a year for 10 years into a retiree health benefits fund, followed by the 2008 Great Recession that slammed volume and revenue. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis pushed the USPS even further to the brink.

The USPS is an essential public service that employs 637,625 government workers. It was never intended to be profit making. If it were solely a business, this would not even be a political issue. Instead, there would be frantic pleas for a “too big to fail” bailout from Congress.

And there would be no president threatening to issue executive orders to stop mail-in balloting, or admitting he denied USPS bailout funding to stop mail-in balloting that he thinks would defeat his reelection.

A new CEO of this mail “business” would have been removed by now for creating chaos by delaying mail from processing plants and post offices, eliminating overtime, removing thousands of blue mail collection boxes, cutting postal retail hours and taking hundreds of mail-sorting machines out of service – all in the middle of a pandemic and right before national elections.

The fact that DeJoy recently agreed to temporarily “suspend” these drastic measures, reveals the power of public outrage. But his determination to continue dismantling postal infrastructure and services after November elections is no less disturbing than before. DeJoy’s current and planned erosion of infrastructure has also damaged public confidence in the USPS ability to handle of election mail, as he suddenly demands that election boards pay first-class rates for first-class treatment of mail-in ballots, while warning that many of those ballots could go uncounted if not sent in time.

The law Nixon signed Aug. 12, 1970, was supposed to take politics out of the post office, not convert it into a partisan weapon. Ironically and unintentionally, DeJoy’s policies provide a practical demonstration of the perils of postal privatization and partisan intervention. With all the stress from the pandemic and its devastation of the economy, people need reassurance, not more anxiety – especially when it comes to reliable mail delivery and free and fair elections. Postal workers are trained to get all the mail through even in the most challenging of times – if allowed.

Elimination of the imposed debt, bailout funding to prevent insolvency because of the PAEA and COVID-19 (not “mismanagement”), and election resource funding for safe, secure voting would be important first steps in moving the mail again.

This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 12:00 AM.