Amid financial struggles and presidential criticism, USPS is facing challenges. But it plays an essential role in US life
In towns where Washington DC is an abstraction, the post office is the front desk of American democracy – sometimes the only public space at all. Here, postmasters are “the human side of government”, as the senator Jennings Randolph put it in 1976. “When such offices are closed,” he warned, “the American flag really comes down.”
Championed by Benjamin Franklin in 1775, the roots of the US postal service – whose mandate is to “bind the nation together” – are older than the republic itself. The constitution calls for “post offices and post roads”. The USPS is still legally obligated to provide a “basic and fundamental” service to all Americans. In Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a rural carrier drives more than 700 miles a year to serve just two households.
Niamh Rowe is a New York-based writer and podcast producer
