Weekend Question 3: Why Was the Post Office So Slow in Recovering from Katrina?

Counterquestion: Why did the private carriers get back to full speed so quickly?

A subscription-only editorial in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal observes, and answers:

A week ago Monday the Times-Picayune reported that the U.S. Postal Service’s New Orleans processing and distribution center would reopen the following day — more than seven months after Katrina hit. The paper called it “a move postal officials say will all but eliminate maddening post-Katrina delivery times of a week or longer for letters mailed just across town.” Not that things are completely back to normal. New Orleanians still don’t receive magazines, “although that is expected within weeks.”

Postal Service competitors fared better. Spokesmen for DHL, FedEx and United Parcel Service tell us that all three companies restored service in New Orleans on September 19, just three weeks after Katrina hit.

All three companies also joined in the relief efforts. DHL ferried international aid to Louisiana from Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas. UPS drivers “from as far away as Vermont hauled loads of donated supplies to FEMA sites in Mississippi and Louisiana — on their own time,” according to a corporate history. And FedEx, a spokesman says, “transported more than 1,000 tons of relief supplies to areas affected by hurricanes in 2005.”

In Katrina’s aftermath we’ve heard a lot about government “incompetence,” mostly from people who have a bone to pick with the Bush Administration. But it seems likely that the private delivery companies would have outshone the Postal Service regardless of who was in the White House. Some things the private sector simply does better.

It seems long past time for the Postal Service to be privatized. Japan is on the verge of completing theirs, even though it has the added complexity of saving and investment accounts to deal with. Why can’t we?
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UPDATE: The Post Office pushes back (HT to commenter below). I will acknowledge that the tasks facing the USPS were more daunting than those facing the three big private firms, but we also have to acknowledge that there were more employees available to help the USPS turn around. But of course, the USPS employees lived and worked in the affected areas, while it’s safe to say that the private carriers, who have major sorting hubs elsewhere, were less proportionately affected. All in all, I don’t think the Journal was taking shots at the carriers themselves; they were saying that a bureaucracy-laden management does not respond as quickly or effectively, no matter how well-meaning everyone is (and I for one am not disputing that). I think the results after more than seven months bear that out, regardless of the fact that the less-disrupted private carriers were up and running in weeks.