Sunday Night Owls: Besides a bailout, Postal Service needs to expand its services innovatively

Night Owls is a themed open thread appearing at Daily Kos seven days a week.

Adam Clark Estes at Vox writes—How the Biden administration can save the Postal Service. The Postal Service has to do more than deliver mail if it wants to survive:

[…] “Envisioning the post office for the future, you can’t just fix the artificial bookkeeping things and then expect the post office to magically be fine in its previous business model,” explained Porter McConnell of the Save the Postal Office Coalition. “I think it needs to be given the ability to innovate, in order to really start being a powerhouse.”

Put differently, even if Congress pulls through with a bailout and ends the prefunding mandate mess, the Postal Service still needs to evolve to survive. The Save the Postal Office Coalition, which includes 300 groups, including the APWU, MoveOn, and Color for Change, came together not long after DeJoy joined the agency and is calling for $89 billion in emergency relief for the agency in President Biden’s first 100 days. It’s also pushing for Biden to appoint a “postal czar” who favors postal banking and reform-minded leaders to fill the four open seats on the USPS Board of Governors, which Trump had left empty in the final months of his presidency. If Biden fills all the seats, Democrat-appointed governors would make up a majority of the board, giving them the power to remove DeJoy from office and reshape the Postal Service’s role in American life.