How does the Post Office work?

It’s the government on your doorstep — the only Executive Branch agency that visits every home in the country on a regular basis. So how does the USPS do it? And what happens when an agency this essential is in trouble? Our guests for this episode are Allison Marsh, history professor at the University of South Carolina and Kevin Kosar, a Vice President at R Street. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Hannah McCarthy?

  Alright Nick, I got a good one for ya. We are gazing at North America from the stratosphere. Okay, you with me? Music swells, and suddenly we zoom in on a newspaper in front of a suburban house. The homeowner steps out to pick it up on her way to the mailbox. But wait, who's that coming down the street? It's her mail carrier coming to hand off some letters to her in person in the front yard of her house.

• 0:33Nick Capodice?

  I feel like you're pitching me the least dramatic movie that anyone has ever seen.

• 0:37Hannah McCarthy?

  It might seem that way at first, but it is dramatic. This is actually from a video that the postal service produced to show how it works. Because when you really stop to think about it, a remarkable confluence of events had to occur for that postal worker to be handing off a bunch of mail from various parts of the country, maybe even the world, to that lady in front of her very own house. It is a huge operation. And by the way, it's a government operation.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  When someone sends a letter, it enters a system already at work that most people never get to see.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  I was interested in how does this government agency deal with millions of letters and parcels every day and get them to the right person across a vast network?

• 1:40Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Allison Marsh.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  And I'm a history professor at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. And I was a former curator at the National Postal Museum.

• 1:51Hannah McCarthy?

  The United States Postal Service is getting a lot of attention lately for being in financial jeopardy and tussling with a president who thinks that it should pull itself up by its own bootstraps. In order to understand how the USPS got to this point and this kind of a relationship with the government, I needed to understand how and why this institution came to be. How it's even possible that there is a service that can and will deliver objects to every home in this country. So let's jump in.

• 2:23Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 2:24Nick Capodice?

  I'm Nick Capodice.

• 2:25Hannah McCarthy?

  And this is Civics 101, a show about the basics of how our democracy works. And today.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Let's go behind this wall and see some of the work the post office does.

• 2:35Hannah McCarthy?

  We're figuring out the mammoth creature that is the US Postal Service, which, as it turns out, is a service that helps to make our democracy work.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  It's from the Constitution.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  This was something that was written into our founding documents that you have the right to this service, that you have a trust, they guarantee your privacy.

• 3:04Nick Capodice?

  Right, the Constitution gives this power to Congress, right? To establish post offices and post roads? Like a literal road designed to deliver mail?

• 3:13Hannah McCarthy?

  Yes, that is how important mail delivery was to the framers. They wrote it into the supreme law of the land.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  They also focused on the idea that you needed to have a network to move information for, you know, for the sake of democracy. That you needed to be able to get the news to people up and down the East Coast. The idea of, we need to have a functioning postal network to have a functioning democracy.

• 3:43Hannah McCarthy?

  And it was about more than just moving mail around. Our postal service had this key feature. It wasn't going to open your mail.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  A postal network existed in colonial North America prior to the establishment of the United States. But there were problems with it. One of the key problems was the fact that the British Postal Service could open your letters and read them and, you know, look for things like, I don't know, revolutionary materials. And so, the idea of having a postal service that you could trust to maintain your privacy was something that the founding fathers really focused on.

• 4:29Nick Capodice?

  Hold on, the British government could just open your mail willy-nilly?

• 4:33Hannah McCarthy?

  That they could. In the US, first-class mail, that is, mail for personal and business correspondence, is pretty soundly protected. With very few exceptions, the government needs a warrant to open your mail.

• 4:47Nick Capodice?

  So our mail system kind of represents one of our earliest tenets of American democracy. You have a right to information and privacy.

• 4:56Hannah McCarthy?

  And these days, it also means equity of access. The USPS is the only delivery service committed to reaching every home in America.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  The mailman knows everybody in the neighborhood, and everybody knows the mailman.

• 5:10Hannah McCarthy?

  But it wasn't always that way. Initially, mail was only delivered from post office to post office. If you wanted to get your mail, you had to go to the local office, and there was no residential delivery.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  This changed, actually, in the mid-19th century, where they started having city free delivery. So that's when you have the first letter carriers, where people would bring the mail directly to your house. And that was great if you happened to live in a city. Less great if you lived in rural America. And in the mid-19th century, the majority of Americans lived in rural lifestyles. So we didn't get rural free delivery until the beginning of the 20th century.

• 5:56Speaker 05

  Country delivery is called rural delivery. So the rural mailman's route is called an RD route. R and D are the first letters of rural delivery.

• 6:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Allison says that even when we did get rural delivery, it could be pretty uneven. It was all about geography and terrain. In Manhattan, you might get your mail four times a day. But in rural Alaska, it might be once a week or a month. But over time, the institution expanded wildly in order to provide greater convenience and connection to a nation's citizens, which I think is like pretty radical. And it took a lot of innovation, like the postage stamp, for example.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  Initially, you would go to the post office and you would ask if you had any mail, and you had to pay on delivery. So you'd pay to pick up your mail. So the invention of the stamp is the idea that you can prepay and your letter will get there.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, Jimmy is buying a stamp for the letter. The money the post office gets for stamps helps pay for the people who work in the post office and for other costs of sending the mail.

• 7:08Nick Capodice?

  So before the stamp, the receiver had to pay to get their mail?

• 7:12Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. So the stamp was this incredibly simple, but kind of ingenious way to pay for the mail.

• 7:18Nick Capodice?

  Quick aside, who designs stamps, by the way? As I was looking them up on the website, and I saw they have a series on Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and Arnold Palmer, and a silver coffee pot.

• 7:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, so the postal service works with various art directors who work with professional artists. They design about 35 stamps a year. And the guidelines are basically the art has to be about positive stuff in American life and history, but that could be anything from like a positive event to a pretty flower. And if it's going to commemorate somebody, that person needs to be deceased. Okay, moving on, another simple clever thing.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  The invention of the mailbox is another thing. Mailboxes weren't required until 1916. Before that, you know, the letter carrier would actually knock on your door and say, "Hey, you have mail." And an efficiency study said that they were losing up to two hours a day just knocking on people's doors. And so they're like, "We need to fix this."

• 8:24Nick Capodice?

  I love to imagine this boardroom is full of post office executives that are brainstorming, like, "What are we gonna do about this door knocking problem?" And suddenly someone stands up and like, "It might sound a little crazy, but so crazy it just might work." What if everyone put a little box outside of their house? And that's like how everyone in America gets a mailbox?

• 8:46Hannah McCarthy?

  Also, Nick, zip codes? Those are fairly new. They were invented by the USPS in the 1960s to make delivery more efficient. Delivery by air was largely figured out by the post office. They also helped to pioneer optical character recognition. That is where a computer scans writing, including handwriting, in order to sort the mail.

• 9:10Nick Capodice?

  So the answer to how the post office became an institution that delivers to every doorstep is that they spent about 200 years inventing clever ways to do it.

• 9:19Hannah McCarthy?

  Right, the post office is a giant system that has enormous needs.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Hey, something that you take for granted that, you know, on the person-to-person basis, it seems, you know, a pen and a piece of paper that you hand to a person that then gets delivered. They don't realize how much technology is built into the post office. And so it's a great combination of both the personal and the individual person-to-person embedded in a highly complex technological system.

• 10:02Nick Capodice?

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• 10:47Nick Capodice?

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• 11:22Nick Capodice?

  Have any of you out there ever Googled your own name? Like actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data is out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background.

• 12:07Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 12:33Nick Capodice?

  All right. You mentioned at the top of the episode that the post office is having somewhat of a hard time these days. And you're describing what sounds like an institution that costs a lot of money to operate. So where does the money come from?

• 12:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, the postal service is one of a handful of independent establishments of the executive branch.

• 12:57Speaker 06

  And it's one of perhaps a couple dozen government agencies that is self-funding.

• 13:04Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Kevin Kosar. He's Vice President for Research Partnerships at the R Street Institute, which is a think tank in Washington DC. You might recognize him from our episode on the Federal Register. Welcome back, Kevin. So Kevin says the United States Postal Service is part of the executive branch and that it is self-funding, right? But what does that mean?

• 13:24Speaker 06

  That is, instead of each year Congress reaching into the Treasury and saying, here's your money, government agency, use it to do what we tell you to do. Instead, the Postal Service covers, or is supposed to cover, its operating costs through the sales of postage.

• 13:39Nick Capodice?

  Didn't you say earlier that Congress is in charge of establishing offices and roads for the USPS?

• 13:43Hannah McCarthy?

  I did. And to be clear, Congress does still have power over the post office, even though it's an independent agency of the executive branch.

• 13:53Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. If they wanted to pass a law saying the Postal Service is abolished, they could do it. The Constitution, as you note, Article 1, Section 8, says that Congress has the authority to establish post office roads. It says nothing more than that. So Congress has a really free hand to design the mail system. And if Congress decided one day, we just don't need a mail system, it could just zero it out.

• 14:17Hannah McCarthy?

  But it wasn't always this way. The United States Post Office is less than 50 years old, and by that I mean the independent office. It used to simply be the post office department of the executive branch.

• 14:30Speaker 06

  It used to be just a standard government department, you know, like Department of Health and Human Services. In 1970, that changed. And it changed because the post office was breaking down. It was losing money. Its functionality was not good. They had terrible management, worker relations. There was a wildcat strike that actually shut down parts of the Postal Service while Nixon was president. And so they decided they needed a new model.

• 15:01Hannah McCarthy?

  A wildcat strike, by the way, means that unionized workers go on strike without authorization or approval from union leadership. And when that happened in 1970, Nixon deputized the National Guard to deliver the mail. It didn't work very well, and the whole system was crippled, which was a major catalyst for Congress passing the Postal Reorganization Act. This struck the Post Office Department from the President's Cabinet, made it an independent agency, kind of like NASA or the CIA, and took away the red tape and regulations, but also said that it now had to cover its own costs. The hope there was that it would force the postal service to operate more efficiently.

• 15:44Speaker 06

  And it did. The model worked pretty darn well from 1970 until about 10 years ago. So when our economy took a huge hit in 2008, mail volume plunged.

• 15:55Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, historically, drops in mail are temporary in recessions, but this time, things didn't really bounce back. More people and businesses moved to electronic communication.

• 16:08Nick Capodice?

  Right, and it's much harder to self-fund if you got less mail.

• 16:11Hannah McCarthy?

  And there's one more thing that is putting a strain on the USPS.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  Our country, we have more and more people with each passing year, and those people live in different places and more addresses. And that, just by its very nature, means that the postal service has a bigger and bigger job to do each year.

• 16:31Nick Capodice?

  So even though there's less mail, more packages, of course, but less mail, there's also more places to deliver to?

• 16:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. And the thing that sets the US Postal Service apart from other delivery operations is that they actually deliver to everybody. Companies like DHL, Amazon, FedEx, they contract with the postal service in order to make sure packages can get to areas where they don't deliver. Now, consider what that means when it comes to a time of crisis.

• 17:03Speaker 06

  Remember back after the 9/11 attacks, we then had a series of packages with anthrax sent through the mails? That triggered a policy change. And the postal service, under an agreement with a few other executive agencies like the Department of Defense, have an agreement that in the event of a national biohazard type attack, the postal service would be the vehicle for getting people the medicines they need to stay safe. They have that network.

• 17:43Nick Capodice?

  So the postal service is a kind of frontline responder when people across the nation need things.

• 17:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, and they deliver to every home. So in some cases, a postal carrier could be the only contact that an individual has, especially in rural areas. So the USPS facing big financial trouble is a problem for everyone.

• 18:04Nick Capodice?

  With so many people and so many businesses who rely on them, what would happen theoretically if it went away?

• 18:19Speaker 06

  There's a lot of societies built on the post office. As we already mentioned, private parcel delivery companies, they don't want to go to every single address. And they hand off parcels and pay the postal service to carry them the final mile. There's a lot of people who are going to be cut off from the economy. They're going to face very formidable prices if they live in remote areas. Second reason, voting by mail. More than 20 million people got election materials and voted by mail. And we know in an age of COVID, that number is going to skyrocket.

• 18:54Nick Capodice?

  Right, yes. I've been reading a lot about this in the news lately. During a pandemic, the presidential election could be completely dependent on the postal service. Not to mention census documents, stimulus checks.

• 19:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, which brings us back, I think, to the ways in which the postal service upholds this democratic system. There's been talk of privatizing the post office, for example, you know, having it go fully independent, not a government agency at all. I asked Allison about this.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Right now, the USPS is mandated that every single citizen pays the same rates. So it does not matter if you are in rural, you know, Montana, or the Dakotas, or Wyoming, you will pay the same price that, you know, someone in one of the big cities on either coast will pay. Now, it does not cost the same for mail to be delivered in highly dense urban areas that it does in rural areas.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  So, right now, the system is set up to subsidize the rural areas. And if we privatize that, will those Americans still have the same access? Because it costs a lot more to go that last mile than it does to do the sort of nice city block.

• 20:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Here's the deal. Kevin says that it's really unlikely that the post office is going to be fully privatized.

• 20:34Speaker 06

  And I can't remember finding a member of Congress who really believed we could privatize the postal service. Not all of our parts are on the same continent, you know? We have Hawaii out there, we have Puerto Rico, we have Virgin Islands, and then never mind trying to get mail up to Alaska. There are logistical challenges there. The idea that it's somehow going to be easily handed over to the private sector and they're going to do it and turn a profit, I think is pretty fanciful.

• 21:04Nick Capodice?

  Well, what do you do then when you've got an essential government agency that is in serious trouble?

• 21:09Hannah McCarthy?

  This is where we stumble into another essential component of a functioning democracy: compromise.

• 21:20Speaker 06

  There's going to have to be a conversation about how do you reform the postal service. They're going to have to cut a deal and it's going to have to do something to address the fact that the postal service's costs outstrip its revenues year after year.

• 21:37Hannah McCarthy?

  I guess the important thing to remember amidst all of this change and chaos is that the USPS is, if nothing else, an innovator, right? It's figured out a lot of massive, impossible-seeming situations. And importantly, it has managed to remain a beloved institution despite lots of setbacks. This is another thing I asked Allison about. Why, if we send so much less mail, if we're all pretty much addicted to digital technologies, if this agency is struggling so much, why is this nation so committed to it? What is it about the mail?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Throughout history, there has been both a love for the post office department, as well as for the people who work for the postal system. And if you think about it, your letter carrier is most likely the person that you, in the federal government, that you have the most intimate relationship with, in that you can see your letter carrier every single day. You might know his or her name, they might know your dog, they might check in on you.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  From the very beginning, the post office was likely the first federal building in any given town, and it was your link to the federal government. So it is what kept you in touch, not only with your friends and your family members, but with your-- the only contact you may have had with the government. So I feel like that commitment is built on centuries of this trust and duty that works.

• 23:33Hannah McCarthy?

  The United States Postal Service is, despite massive shifts in organization and operation, an entity that is as old as the country itself.

• 23:43Hannah McCarthy?

  It might have problems, but it's always been a problem solver, too. So what the USPS will be in the coming years remains to be seen, but it is probably going to figure out a way to be.

• 24:10Nick Capodice?

  Well, that is the USPS for today. This episode was made by Hannah McCarthy with me, Nick Capodice. Our staff includes Christina Phillips as senior producer, Marina Henke as producer, and Rebecca Lavoy as executive producer. Music in this episode by Umkin, Asher Forlaro, the Great North Sound Society, Jesse Gallagher, James Pants, Patrick Patricios, and you know him, you love him, Chris Zabreski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. All right.

• 24:45Speaker 07

  This is Phil Bradison, former Democratic governor of the state of Tennessee. If you love digging into how history shapes US policy, check out the new season of You Might Be Right.

• 24:55Speaker 08

  And this is Bill Haslam, former Republican governor. This season, we're asking the questions that have defined every pivotal moment in American political history. Is democracy really under threat, or is that just a story as old as the republic itself? We're tackling the biggest questions shaping the 2026 midterms, so join us.

• 25:12Speaker 07

  Follow You Might Be Right wherever you get your podcasts.