“My power was almost shut off because my check to my electric company took twelve days to get from Williamsburg to Beto.”
Please President Trump and DOGE butt-kicker Elon Musk… based on our newspaper’s experience as a weekly mail customer of the post office and what’s become near constant interaction with subscribers who seem to have a better chance of getting hit by a meteor than getting the paper we mail them delivered on time, don’t wait too long to DOGE the U.S. Postal Service.
“We were told that they weren’t running the Lane mail route today.”
Because if we’re getting messages like these from people who are complaining about the delivery of their newspapers, which is now almost a constant phenomena in the traditional print division of our media company, it’s a pretty good bet its happening all over the country.
“My rural water payment took two weeks to get to Garnett and I nearly had my water shut off.”
We know… postal service issues aren’t exactly breaking news. Decades of cost overruns, mandates to fund all the future health benefits of future retirees, labor troubles, First Class postage stamps that now cost 73¢, the loss of postal business to email – certainly no shortage of challenges. But you know what? Not to sound calloused, but things are tough all over. According to governmentexec.com, the USPS in 2024 was delivering just 83 percent of First Class Mail on time – its worst performance in the past three years, down from 91 percent the previous year.
Mind you, the local offices seem to be staffed with people who legitimately care about serving their customers. But somewhere along the pipeline between your corner post office in your town, the contract carrier that hauls your mail to a sorting center or Bulk Mail Center in your region and the truck which (allegedly) brings mail back to a local office to be delivered – something is going terribly wrong.
“I received my Jan. 9 and Jan. 16 newspapers at the same time and this is late January.”
What we know now, after all these years of mounting problems and new challenges that only serve to raise prices and reduce service, is that the management of the USPS is utterly befuddled and unable to solve these problems. If we’re going to have a national postal tradition in this country that can function in tanem with competition from private package deliverers, ongoing technology developments and service demands from the public, then somebody else is going to have to dive in and break the old molds. There simply can be no better time than this historic shakeup in the federal government for these amazing disruptors to wade into the operational abyss that is the U.S. Postal Service.
“I’ve asked about first class mail sometimes and have been told that the second truck didn’t come down from the city that day with it to Garnett.”
And how coincidental is it that one of the biggest messes in the federal government – or rather a “quasi-governmental agency” – is at the same time steeped up to its gizzard in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion– that policy so despised by the President and the DOGE Master that it was among the first governmental malcontents summoned to the Trump2 guillotine? The revelations of billions of dollars wasted in other areas of government like USAID or the $20 billion hidden by the Biden EPA for later retrieval, has crystallized what we all knew to be true but needed executive authority to confirm: that the best examples of inefficiency, waste and all around wretched work product, both in and out of government, are also the most rife with DEI. That’s why major corporations like management of companies like Amazon and Disney, now feeling like they have cover to slip the yoke of this woke nonsense, are canning it with all due speed. If only the USPS could have a similar revelation.
“People on my block here in Garnett are continually delivering mail to each other that is sorted wrong and left at the wrong address.”
After all, what could have more bearing on the mission of sorting and delivering the mail than having your identity and your sense of self “confirmed” and feeling “included” in your job?
Sure.
“Fostering an inclusive work environment is a core strategy within the United States Postal Service, the web page reads. “We strive to equip and empowewr employees to recognize and address unconscious bias and to help us live out our pledge to value and respect the dignity of our employees.” (Still waiting for that part about delivering the mail…)
“I received a handful of Kansas City Star papers in one day. All were late.”
USPS lauds itself for those diversity initiatives: “We have been ranked among the ‘50 Best Companies for Minorities” by Fortune magazine” the agency gushes. Again…mail delivery? Anyone? Bueller?
To thieve from Jack Nicolson’s Joker character in the 1989 Batman movie: The USPS needs an enema. The voter-approved Trump/DOGE tsunami is the perfect time.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
