Sen. McCaskill: Postal Service vital for small towns, rural communities

At Homeland Security Committee meeting, Senator discusses need for bipartisan postal reform

Washington – U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill used a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee meeting to discuss the urgent need for reforms to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to help protect delivery service for Missourians in rural communities.

“Speaking on behalf of hundreds of thousands of rural Missourians, where that post office is a lifeline to the economic vibrancy of that community – I think we are going to be held accountable if we don’t do the really hard work of getting some of these really difficult questions hammered out on the Postal Service,” said McCaskill, a native of Rolla, Mo.

“It is essential to rural America. If we allow this to go to the lowest common denominator, once again, rural America will get the short shrift,” McCaskill said.

McCaskill and a bipartisan group of 29 Senate colleagues recently sent a letter to USPS demanding a delay in the planned consolidation of up to 82 USPS mail processing facilities. The Senators urged the USPS to fulfil its obligations to adequately study the impact of the consolidations, and to inform the public of those impacts, which the USPS Inspector General found that it failed to do.

“I think we all know in our gut that if we allow [the Postal Service] to be totally privatized, that it will be our rural constituency that will pay a very heavy price,” McCaskill said.

“I think we have the best postal service in the world, and I think if we allow it to atrophy and say, ‘Well, just let privatization take over, let it just be private,’ I’m going to have a hard time explaining to my rural constituency why we weren’t there for them at this incredibly important time in the history of the postal service.”