Dear Committee Members and Staff:
Thank you for this opportunity to submit comments regarding the Postal Service’s deteriorating service quality and its weakened ability to adequately fulfill its primary responsibilities that are consistent with its original charter.
As millions of American consumers across country continue to depend on the US Postal Service’s basic service to send and receive mail in a timely and affordable manner, it is greatly concerning to observe the agency’s struggles to meet last year’s lowered performance goals. New service standards mandated by the Postal Service at the start of 2015 indicated that mail would be expected to reach its recipients on an average of 2.1 days – up from the previous goal of 1.8 days. Despite these relaxed standards, the Postal Service, according to a recent Inspector General management alert, reported a 48 percent increase in delayed mail for the first six months of 2015.
The Postal Service’s reduction of standards and inability to meet them is just one component of the agency’s shifting philosophy to neglect its core obligations – letter mail delivery – in order to seek out and cross-subsidize new experimental products, including delivery of packages and groceries, as well as the provision of same day delivery services and potentially banking services.
Without an adequate financial justification for how these diversions are directly improving its core obligations, it is clear that the Postal Service must return its full attention to delivering letter mail in a timelier fashion and at a reasonable rate for consumers.
Thank you for considering these concerns of our organization and if you have any questions please feel free to reach me by email ([email protected]).
Sincerely,
Steve Pociask
President and CEO
American Consumer Institute
Center for Citizen Research
1701 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20006