By Phil McCausland, NBC News
06 September 20
readersupportednews.org
“For people out here, the Postal Service is absolutely a lifeline," a West Virginia farmer said.
hen
Jacob Gray opened the box of chicks he ordered, he saw that about 300
of them had been mashed to a pulp. The 100 or so birds that survived
tread on their dead fellows and nibbled on what remained of them.
Gray, 28, has been ordering chicks from a breeder in
California for his farm in rural southwest Colorado for more than seven
years. He never lost more than about a dozen birds in a perforated box
of 400 because the U.S. Postal Service delivered them within two days.
That changed over the past few months, as the boxes
arrived days late to his home in Delta County, Colorado, an area larger
than Rhode Island with a population of about 30,000 people.
“I opened it up and was immediately hit with the smell
of death,” he said of the most recent box he received two weeks ago.
“Sometimes, the post office would call us in the morning and say, ‘Get
these things out of here,’ because they smelled so bad.”
Hundreds of baby birds Gray ordered this summer have
died, and he said he had to cancel his remaining orders and renegotiate
his farm loan because of nearly $4,000 in losses — more than 10 percent
of what he’d hoped to earn this year.
Recent Postal Service delays have affected millions
of Americans’ packages and letters, but the impact has been
particularly widespread and difficult in rural communities, which depend
on the federal agency more than densely populated regions of the United
States.
In addition to chicks and other small livestock,
including honeybees, farmers order seeds and specialty tools they can
no longer purchase locally. Meanwhile, hundreds of rural pharmacies have
closed in recent years, leaving residents dependent on mailed prescriptions. In addition, millions of people living in remote areas lack broadband internet, so they rely on the Postal Service to pay bills, receive paychecks, conduct business and correspond with family and friends.
“As important as the Postal Service is to the rest of
the country,” said Arthur Sackler, manager of the Coalition for a 21st
Century Postal Service, an independent group that advocates for the
agency in Washington, D.C., “it’s considerably more so to our far-flung
rural areas.”
The Postal Service came under intense scrutiny in
recent weeks over the long wait times for letter and package deliveries.
Many blamed recently appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a
Republican donor and ally of President Donald Trump.
In two tense Congressional hearings last month,
Democrats accused DeJoy, a former logistics executive, of hamstringing
the agency on Trump’s behalf to undermine mail-in voting. DeJoy and the
president have both rejected the characterization that they were holding
up the mail for political reasons, with the postmaster general largely
blaming the pandemic for the widespread delay of deliveries.
“The U.S. Postal Service, like other delivery
companies, has experienced some temporary service disruptions in a few
locations domestically, due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Postal Service
spokeswoman Kim Frum said in an email. “Things are slowly getting back
to normal, however until we reach pre-COVID conditions, we continue to
leverage our available resources to match the increased workload,
including hiring based on local needs.”
While the Postal Service’s performance is beginning to
tick back upward, after timely deliveries fell more than 10 percent
beginning in July, according to the agency’s numbers,
people living in rural communities say they’re still seeing the fallout
of the delays. The Postal Service reported last week that its “last
mile” delivery network — or mail that is carried to underserved rural
communities — remained down 4.26 percent from its baseline.
Gray expanded his farm earlier this year, putting up
new buildings and planning to begin selling his pasture-raised chickens
to restaurant distributors in Denver. But the delays have put his
business in jeopardy. He hoped to earn more than $30,000 this year, but
the losses have eaten into more than 10 percent of his income, as even
the birds that survive the delays have become sick and died before he
can process and sell them.
“It’s delaying things,” he said. “We’re not maybe going to lose the farm, but it hurts.”
Rob Larew, the president of the National Farmers
Union, a group that represents thousands of farmers across 33 states,
said many of his members have complained about continued delays harming
their businesses. And the effect goes beyond farmers, he said, since the
Postal Service is a critical lifeline for rural communities nationwide.
“Out here, it just isn't that simple,” he said from
his farm in rural West Virginia. “Everything already takes additional
time, and so that adds cost. Even if it's not delivery cost, it's the
cost of time. If you start to remove those last key delivery options,
you put rural communities in a complete bind.”
The Federal Communications Commission estimated this
year that 14.5 million Amercians in rural areas don't have access to
broadband internet in an increasingly digital world. Larew pointed out
that the Postal Service helps connect people who don’t have the internet
at their fingertips.
Critics say the cause of the Postal Service delays is
DeJoy’s insistence that mail trucks run on time, which he admitted
before Congress that he did without adjusting mail processing. That
meant mail trucks were leaving processing facilities close to empty,
with mail and packages left behind, mail carriers have previously told NBC News. And that led to a backlog of deliveries at many post offices.
DeJoy’s detractors have also raised concerns about the
Postal Service’s decision to remove letter-sorting machines and blue
collection boxes, which appeared to coincide with Trump’s disparagement of mail-in voting and the Postal Service’s warning to dozens of states that they may not be able to handle the millions of mailed ballots expected this year.
After facing public pressure, DeJoy said he would suspend — though not reverse — all policy or operational changes until after the presidential election.
Postal workers, meanwhile, emphasized that DeJoy had
cut back on overtime and extra trips that carriers took to ensure the
swift delivery of mail. DeJoy stated in congressional testimony that
overtime rates had remained the same. Extra trips, though, have dropped:
Postal Service data shows that they fell from close to 150,000 at the end of June to fewer than 5,000 at the end of August.
Sackler, of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal
Service, said many of these decisions — particularly the removal of the
mail-sorting machines and blue boxes — preceded DeJoy, but the
postmaster general and the agency pursued them with a lack of
transparency, causing confusion.
“There was no real consultation of any kind with
postal stakeholders, with unions, with customers, with Congress about
how [DeJoy] was going to be doing this, and predictably service
dropped,” he said.
The drop in service, meanwhile, has many looking
toward November. While many states expect to see a rise in mail-in
ballots this year amid coronavirus concerns, rural residents are
particularly reliant on the Postal Service for voting access.
Larew said the Farmers Union noticed that polling
locations in rural places, once run by older people who sign up to be
poll workers, have a deficit of volunteers this year. Local governments,
including in Larew’s native West Virginia, have begun to consolidate
polling locations in response, which means rural Americans will have to
drive farther to cast their ballots.
Other states are seeing similar issues. Louisiana
Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced a recruitment campaign this
week because of a shortage of volunteers. Texas consolidated nearly a
dozen polling locations in its most rural counties before July’s
election because of a lack of poll workers.
The Election Assistance Commission said that more than
half of the 900,000 poll workers who served in 2016 were over the age
of 60, meaning that the majority of those poll workers would be
considered at high-risk during the pandemic. That has many election officials concerned they could see a major shortfall come November.
“Mail-in ballots are the only safe and reasonable
alternative to that,” Larew said. “Limiting the access or reliability of
that marginalizes these rural residents.”
The delays have also taken a toll on mailed prescription drugs.
With a growing number of insurance companies forcing
or incentivizing Americans to receive their prescription drugs by mail,
rather than from a brick-and-mortar pharmacy, the number of mailed
medications has grown in recent years and even more so amid the pandemic.
The Postal Service managed 1.2 billion prescription
drug shipments last year — or about 4 million each day, six days a week —
the National Association of Letter Carriers reported. Rural residents
in particular depend on mailed medications, as 1,231 independently owned
rural pharmacies, or approximately 16 percent, closed between 2003 and
2018, according to the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis.
“For these isolated and marginalized rural
communities, and for the farmers and ranchers in them, the Postal
Service has been a great equalizer and essential service that has helped
them at least be able to tap into some of what everyone else has,”
Larew said. “For people out here, the Postal Service is absolutely a
lifeline.”
Eight words are worth 1,000 pictures.
ernie
Sanders is sounding the alarm. The Vermont senator is warning Americans
they have to get ready for the possibility that President Donald Trump
will refuse to step down if he loses the election in November. 
fter
the intelligence community briefed members of Congress in late July
about threats to the upcoming election, Democrats expressed alarm about
what they had learned — and about the fact that the information had not
been shared with the American public. “The warning lights are flashing
red. America’s elections are under attack,” wrote Sen. Richard
Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in 
