United States Postal Service

The Re-organization of 1970 converted a poorly managed government agency that required government funding virtually every year, to a self sustaining quasi-government organization. Up to 2003 the Postal Service experienced substantial growth in mail volume and revenue. Unfortunately, the regular1st-Class mail volume and revenue started to drop due to the increase in electronic communication; however the recession that started during the latter part of 2007 compounded the problem going into the first quarter of 2009. The Postal Service was also seriously encumbered by the Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, imposed by a deceitful administration under Presidential Bush. The main purpose of this new regulation was to force the outsourcing of mail processing and deliveries, with no net benefit to the American public while eliminating good paying middle class jobs provided by the Postal Service.

After the 1970 Re-organization there was a misguided facility expansion and replacement process that was initiated by the Core of Engineers and mimicked by the new Postal Service's Facility Organization. The basic problem was that the Facility Organization concentrated on providing the least expensive facility replacements while totally ignoring the impact on operations. Senior management realized this deficiency by 1975, then in 1976 established a new organization identified as Operational Requirements, reporting to Mail Processing, which also assumed responsibility for all centrally funded equipment deployment. Unfortunately, whatever the intent of this new organization it was not staffed with the appropriate talent at the Regional level, and was not provided with the appropriate training and guidance from the Headquarters unit. I could never understand why the Headquarters unit, for some odd reason never pursued the enforcement of its intended purpose, as was described to me by the Northeast Regional Postmaster General when I took over the management of the Northeast Regional Operational Requirement unit in January 1978.

In 1986 the Board of Governors hired a temporary Postmaster General, from outside the Postal Service, to Re-organize it into a more efficient organization. The new Postmaster General decided that to provide a more efficient organization it was necessary to remove the major portion of middle management (Regions and Districts), and flatten the organization with virtually all operational decisions made at the local operational level. To accomplish this he eliminated the Districts and wanted to reduce the Regions to about 10% of its previous size, with oversight responsibility for; budgets, service, safety, etc. ---- Postal management convinced the PMG to limit the reduction to about 40%. In effect the size of the five Regions were now too large for its functional responsibility and too small for the proper coordination and oversight of all productivity improvement programs This was a major blunder because local management primarily concentrated on processing and delivering the mail and did not have the ability to evaluate the economic merits of decisions related to productivity improvements, most of which included, the housing of new mail processing equipment and facility expansions, replacements or consolidations. The Regional Industrial Engineering unit that had oversight responsibility for all productivity improvement programs was eliminated along with the Operational Requirements that was responsible for developing the targeted productivity improvements for the deployment of all centrally funded mail processing equipment. The eliminated Operational Requirement units were supposed to provide the proper economic evaluation for all alternatives related to facility expansions, replacements, consolidations and leasing options. Unfortunately, the Northeast Region turned out to be the only one of the five Regions that was adhering to this functional responsibility, with a couple of the other Regions just starting to move in this direction going into 1986. This could have been the reason for its elimination with the responsibility returned back to the Facility Organization. --- A disastrous decision.