Seventy-Three Cents of Civilization
Monday May 12, 2025
The United States Postal Service is one of the most quietly extraordinary systems in modern life.
It is not magical or divine. It works because hundreds of thousands of people make it work. Every day, in every kind of weather, they carry out a mission that stretches across every corner of the country. For less than the cost of a candy bar, you can send a letter from rural Alaska to downtown Miami, and it will usually arrive in just a few days. There is no subscription, no surcharge, and no questions asked.
We treat this as normal. It should not be.
We live in a world where private delivery companies often charge fifteen dollars to ship a toothbrush across town. In contrast, the Postal Service delivers medicine to the Navajo Nation, birthday cards to snowbound towns in Minnesota, and daily mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, carried by mule. This happens not because it is profitable, but because someone lives there, and the postal network is designed to reach everyone.
This is not a miracle. It is a public institution doing exactly what it was built to do: connect a nation, reliably, affordably, and without favor.
The core strength of the Postal Service is deceptively simple: it reaches everyone. Every household. Every business. Every post office box. Every one of the 166 million delivery points across the United States and its territories. The private sector calls this “the last mile” because it is the hardest, most expensive part of any delivery. The Postal Service simply calls it Tuesday.
This is not an accidental achievement. The network is mandated by federal law, which requires the Postal Service to provide “prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas” and to do so without discrimination. That is the universal service obligation. You can live in a dense Manhattan high-rise or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Supai, Arizona, and the mail will still arrive. Supai is the only place in the country where delivery is made by mule train, which continues five days a week, weather permitting, through an arrangement that dates back over a century.
Private logistics firms do not even attempt this kind of coverage. When they serve rural or remote addresses at all, they often hand off packages to the Postal Service for final delivery, a practice known in the industry as “last-mile delivery partnership.” In short, even FedEx and UPS rely on USPS to go where they will not.
It is easy to take this reach for granted, but it is what makes everything else possible. Mail delivery is not just a convenience. It is critical infrastructure.
In 2023, the Postal Service handled more than 127 billion pieces of mail, an average of 318 million items every single day. This includes everything from letters and magazines to small parcels, election ballots, and prescription medications. It is one of the largest physical delivery operations in the world, and it does not take weekends off.
No private carrier comes close to this scale. FedEx handled about 6.3 million packages per day in the U.S. in 2023, and UPS reported just over 18 million. Both companies focus on profitable, high-volume areas and often leave rural and remote addresses to the Postal Service. In fact, FedEx Ground Economy and UPS SurePost both rely on USPS for final delivery in locations they do not serve directly. When the other carriers say they offer nationwide delivery, they often mean they let the Postal Service finish the job.
That handoff works because USPS has built a vast and deeply integrated infrastructure. Mail is routed through a network of more than 200 processing facilities using automated sorting systems that can read addresses, apply barcodes, and organize mail by exact delivery sequence, all at speeds exceeding 30,000 pieces per hour. The scale of that system is matched only by its workforce. With over 500,000 career employees, USPS is one of the largest civilian employers in the country and one of the few whose workers are physically present in every community.
It is easy to assume that such a large system must be wasteful or outdated. In fact, the opposite is true. The Postal Service delivers more mail, to more places, with fewer errors than any other carrier in the country. It just happens quietly.
One of the most persistent myths about the Postal Service is that it is a drain on the federal budget. In fact, USPS is an independent agency that is self-funded through the sale of postage and services. It receives no tax dollars for its operating expenses. The letter that shows up in your mailbox was paid for by the person who sent it.
Despite that independence, Congress still has a heavy hand on the agency’s balance sheet. In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required the Postal Service to pre-fund retiree health benefits seventy-five years into the future. No other federal agency or private business has been held to such a standard. This one requirement alone created tens of billions of dollars in paper losses and distorted public understanding of the Service’s financial health for more than a decade.
The law also capped postage increases and introduced strict cost allocation rules that made it harder to compete in a growing package market. In short, USPS has been expected to operate like a business while being regulated like a utility and constrained like a public trust.
Despite those constraints, the system continues to function, efficiently, affordably, and at a scale no private firm would attempt. It is not failing. It is being sabotaged.
The Postal Service has long been a political punching bag. It is large, visible, and constitutionally mandated, yet it operates outside the federal budget and without lobbyists in the room. That combination makes it both vulnerable and easy to misrepresent.
In recent years, there have been repeated calls to privatize the Postal Service or cut its services in the name of reform. These proposals often come couched in the language of modernization or cost savings, but the core idea is simple: remove the universal service obligation and let the profitable routes subsidize the rest. That is not reform. That is asset stripping.
The idea is not new. The White House proposed privatization as early as the Reagan administration, and the Trump administration revived it in 2018, arguing that USPS should compete more directly with private carriers. But the private sector has never been interested in serving unprofitable regions, and never will be. The Postal Service exists precisely because the market does not solve this problem on its own.
That is what makes it a target. USPS does something no one else will do. It delivers millions of pieces of mail a day, on time, to every address in the country, without pricing discrimination. It connects rural America to the rest of the country, and it does so reliably. That reliability threatens the narrative that only private enterprise can deliver efficiency at scale. So the Postal Service must be painted as bloated, obsolete, or broken, even when the evidence says otherwise. The political attacks are not about failure. They are about success. And success, at this scale, is dangerous to certain kinds of power.
The USPS has long been a model of public infrastructure: vast, efficient, and universally accessible. Yet its very success has made it a target for privatization efforts, often justified by claims of modernization or fiscal responsibility. To understand the potential consequences of such moves, we can look to countries that have already taken this path.
In the United Kingdom, the privatization of Royal Mail began in 2013 and was completed by 2015. While the government raised £3.3 billion from the sale, the aftermath included significant job losses, with over 12,000 positions eliminated, and the closure of numerous mail centers and delivery offices. Additionally, executive compensation soared, with the CEO’s pay nearing £2 million, and nearly £1 billion was paid out in dividends to shareholders. Service quality also declined, leading to fines for failing to meet delivery targets.
The Netherlands, one of the first European countries to privatize its postal service, faced its own challenges. The privatization of PTT Post in 1989 led to widespread criticism over service quality and labor conditions. Reports highlighted that service levels reached historic lows, and many employees lived in fear of job loss due to the pressures of a profit-driven model .
These international examples illustrate that privatizing postal services often leads to diminished service quality, job losses, and a focus on profitability over public service. As discussions about the future of USPS continue, it’s crucial to consider these outcomes and recognize the value of a publicly operated postal system that prioritizes universal service and community needs.
The greatest danger to the Postal Service is not failure. It is familiarity. It works so well, and so quietly, that most Americans have forgotten what bad actually looks like. A friend once remarked that the United States functions so smoothly in so many domains, logistics, infrastructure, public health, that we mistake reliability for inevitability. The mail shows up because it always has. But that is not a law of nature. It is the result of design, labor, and commitment. And its absence would be felt immediately.
The stakes are not abstract. Rural pharmacies and health systems rely on the Postal Service to deliver medications where private carriers do not operate consistently or affordably. The Department of Veterans Affairs ships 80 percent of prescriptions through USPS, reaching veterans in small towns and on tribal lands with critical medication, often within days.
In 2020, the Postal Service handled more than 135 million election-related mail pieces, including ballots, registration forms, and voter information. With decades of experience in chain-of-custody protocols, USPS became a last line of democratic infrastructure during a public health crisis. Any loss of capacity would erode confidence in future vote-by-mail programs, especially in areas already underserved.
The same network that delivers ballots also delivers opportunity. Tens of thousands of small businesses depend on USPS for affordable shipping, especially those operating out of home offices, farms, or storefronts far from major logistics hubs. Unlike private carriers, the Postal Service does not penalize you for living where you live.
Then there is what you cannot track with a barcode. The sympathy card sent by hand. The tax refund check from an overworked state treasury office. The letter from a grandparent who never really got the hang of email. These are small things, but they are also part of the social infrastructure. The disappearance of that network would be felt most by those who already have the fewest alternatives.
If the Postal Service vanished tomorrow, there would be a scramble to rebuild it. But by then, the damage would already be done.
What the Postal Service offers is not magic. It is the product of planning, scale, and the daily work of hundreds of thousands of people. It delivers more mail to more places than any other system in the world, and it does so without favoritism, without subsidies, and without fail.
And yet it operates under constant suspicion. It is mocked as obsolete, burdened with mandates, starved of flexibility, and routinely threatened with privatization. These are not the consequences of failure. They are the penalties of competence. The real question is not whether the Postal Service can be saved. The real question is whether we are wise enough to keep what already works.