...With three Congresses in a row failing to pass legislation to help stabilize its finances, some lawmakers and policy experts have reached the consensus that it’s time for the government to sell the post office.
This group was limited for a few years to conservatives and Republicans in Congress. But now a Democrat at the centrist Brookings Institution, Washington’s premier academic think tank, is joining the privatization side, arguing in a new paper that Congress’s inaction requires that something be done. Elaine Kamarck says that letting politicians continue to protect the Postal Service from competition is no longer viable.
“If the USPS were a purely private entity, the changing shape of the marketplace wouldn’t necessarily pose an existential threat,” Kamarck wrote in an essay made public last week, “Delaying the inevitable: Political stalemate and the U.S. Postal Service.”
Elaine Kamarck's paper can be found here. Ms. Kamarck is a Senior Fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings and the Director of the Center for Effective Public Management. The article notes that she was the "creator and manager" of the Clinton Administration's reinventing government initiative in the 1990s.
Here is a response to the article from the president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
