Matthew Moore: A small change took effect in the United States Postal Service’s domestic mail manual. It clarifies that a postmark will no longer indicate the date a piece of mail was deposited with USPS. Elena Patel is the co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, and self-admittedly someone who thinks a lot about postal mail policy. She says that one thing to note is that this is not a policy change about postmarks, the USPS has changed how it operates.
Elena Patel: And that means that there are consequences for a particular process, which is postmarking, in a way that extends beyond the Postal Service to sort of other agencies and groups that rely on postmarks.
Moore: And so, yeah, and that was exactly what they told me. I reached out to the Postal Service and requested an interview. They declined an interview, but they did offer a statement that says, in part, quote, “Virtually all letters or flats sent by individuals using stamps, which include things like cards, letters, tax returns, those receive a postmark. If a customer wants to ensure that a mailpiece receives a postmark and that the postmark aligns with the date of mailing, the customer may take the mailpiece to a post office, station or branch and request a manual postmark at the retail counter when tendering their mailpiece. The Postal Service also offers certified mail or registered mail service at the post office. If a mailer purchases these services, the mailer will get a receipt that includes tracking information.”
When we’re thinking about postmarking, and especially when we’re thinking about critical pieces of mail like mail-in ballots, tax documentation, perhaps sending in a bill that needs to be done in a timely manner, what is your response to this statement from the Postal Service?
Patel: I think that those directions are good to remind people that one, in principle, always has the option to go to a retail counter and request hand cancellation, which is the Post Office’s term for postmarking. It just means you can’t use the stamp again. That’s what cancellation means. And then it comes with a date, so one can always go to a retail counter.
What worries me about that narrative is it sort of ignores barriers to access for people across the country, or I guess downplays the risk. So, for example, in rural areas, post offices are further away and they operate, almost all of them operate, with more limited retail hours. And so people in rural areas have more frictions that they face when they’re trying to get to a post office to hand cancel something time-sensitive, like a bill or a ballot or whatever is being sent through the system. So that’s what worries me about that.
It also ignores or downplays the risk of folks with mobility issues who really maybe can’t easily get to a post office. And frankly, before these operational changes, we were at much less risk of having a day or more delay between when their mail, their mailman or their collection box, when the mail is picked up. They faced a much lower risk of delayed postmarking before. So the directions are the same. The policy is the same. There are risks to certain populations that I think, at a minimum, people need to be educated about so that if they can shift their behavior, that they go ahead and do that.
Moore: So my understanding of this change, and hopefully you can either tell me if I’m wrong or help to clarify what my understanding is, but let’s say that I have something that I want to put in the mail today. Today is Tuesday. If I put it in the mail previously, the USPS policy was that if I put it in the mail on Tuesday during business hours, it would be postmarked for Tuesday, that day. The policy now is that it may or may not necessarily be postmarked on the same day that it was put into the Postal Service’s hands. Is that an accurate understanding of the policy?
Patel: With a small correction. So it’s not that the policy resulted in that. It’s that the operations of the Postal Service supported the fact that it was likely that your mail that you dropped on Tuesday in your blue box or was picked up would be postmarked that day. And the reason for that is because under the old system, where most mail received its first processing step locally, there were many local facilities that did this first processing, that is the point at which the Post Office says, OK, your stamp has been used. We’re going to cancel it so that you can’t reuse the stamp. What’s happening operationally now for the purposes of cutting costs and improving efficiency, it’s no secret that the Postal Service is also struggling financially, and so these operational changes are in the context of the Postal Service trying to right the fiscal ship, so to speak.
But under the new system, most mail is going to travel much further to be processed. And also, when you’re sending a letter out, there is going to be fewer pickups at certain post offices for that mail to enter the system to begin with. And so it’s the combination of those two things, mail traveling further and again, for people or places that are further from these centralized processing centers, it is more likely that the mail is going to wait a day before it ever really begins its journey to be processed, and for that reason, the postmark will be delayed.
Moore: It’s interesting that you talk about these processing facilities, because just in the last year or so, here in northwest Arkansas, in Fayetteville actually, there is a processing center here. There was talk of closing that facility and all of our mail, essentially, if you wanted to send a letter or something from, say, Fayetteville to a neighboring town, Bentonville or Rogers, that mail would have to go all the way to Oklahoma City and then go all the way back to the neighboring town instead of being processed here locally.
What is complicated there? Let’s say I want to send you a piece of mail. Because of this consolidation, because of the way that operations are changing, what friction happens between me sending you a piece of mail and you getting that piece of mail?
Patel: Yeah. So the process that you’re describing, and to think back to the old system, local turnaround is this term that if you’re trying to mail something within the same city or the same area, and it’s sort of originating and destination in the same place, most of that mail has historically been handled at these local processing centers like you’ve been talking about, which is what allows the Postal Service to turn that mail around pretty quickly. So it shouldn’t take more than two or three days, I think, under current standards for that mail to get processed.
So you drop it off, it’s processed, it’s sorted, it’s put on a truck and then it’s delivered to somebody in the same area. That’s called local turnaround. That was like the norm for local mail under the old system. Under the new system, there have been pretty strong changes in the way that processing is happening overall. And that can have some important implications for the likelihood that your local mail is staying local.
As first proposed by the Postal Service, most mail was losing a guarantee that it was going to be locally processed unless you happen to be near one of these centralized hubs where they’re trying to push all the mail to. And so in Chicago, for example, there is what’s called an RPDC, which is where the mail is being processed, and the mail in Chicago has to go to a centralized place that happens to be close by. And so that’s going to help in general with local turnaround, just like local processing was happening before.
In a lot of Arkansas, as it was first announced, local mail was going to leave and potentially even go out of state, which I should say, out of state can sound scarier than it is for the Postal Service. Mail is crossing state lines in a way that is just part of their operations. But that mail was going to a processing center that was further away.
The Postal Service has said a few times now that they’re trying to retain local processing in places where it’s cost-effective. And I do think at least one of the processing centers in Arkansas is retaining what’s called local turnaround, even though the network is being redesigned. And I think some of that, I hope, is the Postal Service acknowledging the frictions that are coming from consolidating mail in places that are more rural. They have announced that some local processing is going to remain.
Moore: I’m speaking with Elena Patel, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. What are some specific examples of how a delay in postmarks could impact a person’s life?
Patel: So the point of writing that article was really to, again, educate people who are interacting with the mail system so hopefully they have more awareness and can kind of adjust their behavior to not get caught up in this.
So there are a couple of big cases that I think are important to recognize as being exposed to this network redesign and require really public education for people to be able to adjust. So one is election mail, which the Postal Service, I think throughout this process, has tried to really emphasize their recommendation to customers, which is if you have something as time-sensitive as election mail, you should take it to the post office to have it hand-canceled so you can be assured that your vote is counted. Again, that’s not so easy for everybody to accommodate, but that policy is there.
So for election mail in some states, as long as your ballot is postmarked by election day, it can be received by election officials one, two or three days after, depending on state policy. That’s an example of a system that basically layers on top of Postal Service operations to impose legal deadlines that I think we need to have to understand, sort of when the chain of custody of a letter changed from a person to the government entity, which is the Postal Service.
And so that kind of legal recognition of timing is embedded in things much broader than election mail. And so it relates to the common example, which is tax filing. Most people like to wait until the last minute to file their taxes. We should just acknowledge that as long as your taxes are postmarked by April 15, they’re counted as being filed on time, and many people file right up on that deadline.
The risk of the network redesign is that if you drop your tax return in the mail on April 15, it might not be postmarked, depending on where you’re sending it, until April 16 or, depending on how tax day falls across the weekend, it can take several days for the postmark to happen. And so if you’re a procrastinator, you need to know that so that you are at least shifting back to take into account the delay or taking your tax return to the Postal Service to be hand-cancelled.
And then it’s bigger than that. It’s more than tax returns and it’s more than election mail. What I tried to point out in the article is there are a lot of places in the legal system where this notion of the postmark exactly demarcating, or being treated as though it demarcates, is when I drop something off, is embedded. And so this can be related to appeals with court cases. It doesn’t even have to be government, it could be that you’re filing an appeal with your private health insurance company for a decision that they made, which needs to be in the mail by a certain date. All of these dates implicitly or often explicitly take the postmark as you have done something by a certain date. And so when there’s a delay, you weaken that in a way that I think makes things legally complicated.
Moore: Let’s say that the administration decides that you, Elena Patel, are going to be the next postmaster general of the United States.
Patel: Oh, boy.
Moore: What are two changes that you think could be made, or two things that could be adjusted, to make the Postal Service work better and be the best asset to the American people?
Patel: That is a very big and good question. I would say that the thing that I think about as somebody who thinks a lot about postal policy and has for a pretty long time is how much I wish that legislatures, actually, and Congress would take back up the concept of what the Postal Service is and how Congress is expecting the Postal Service to operate.
If Congress is expecting the Postal Service to operate under the current parameters, which is they need to be self-funded with limited access to loans, they have a cap on how much debt they can undertake. They basically borrow from the federal government up until a cap. And if they expect them to operate under a business model that was designed in 1970 at a moment when we had a lot of letter mail, I think that the Postal Service is doing everything they can right now to make their operations more efficient, unfortunately at the consequence, in some cases, of the service that people are receiving.
In part, because we don’t have really strong guardrails and parameters around what service the American people expect from the Postal Service and what the Postal Service has to deliver. And so if I were PMG, I would be using all of my political capital to go to Congress to say we need to rethink this funding model in recognition of the Postal Service as the public good that it is, that perhaps does need taxpayer support to be able to deliver letters to everybody at affordable rates, which is the mission of the Postal Service and the universal service obligation.
Moore: Elena, anything I forgot, anything you want to make sure we touch on here?
Patel: One thing I meant to say when we were talking about the frictions is I think it’s important to recognize also, when you’re in denser urban areas, you think, why don’t you file electronically or submit your bill online, or use the internet to make it so that you’re not relying on the Postal Service?
Broadband coverage in the U.S. in dense urban areas is very good. It’s good when you get outside of dense areas, but there are plenty of pockets where the internet is not a workable solution. And I think people forget sometimes that our broadband coverage, when you are approaching less dense rural areas, is something like 80%. And so there are plenty of households for whom paying a bill online is just not an option.
And if it’s not an option, then you have to figure out, can I get to a retail counter during limited hours to hand-cancel my mail? And so that’s just part of this narrative of these frictions that I think are easy to forget about when you live in a city that a lot of people in the country face when they’re trying to follow the Postal Service’s guidelines and hand-canceling their mail.
Moore: Elena Patel is the co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. You can find her article here.
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