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Public health. Our democracy. Small business. What do these three vastly different things have in common? They are under threat from President Donald Trump’s attempt to dismantle the U.S. Postal Service.
My small business has depended on the Postal Service from the very beginning. Seven years ago, I started Zootility as a project on Kickstarter to design and manufacture multi-use pocket tools. I used the Postal Service to send our first pocket tool, the PocketMonkey, to people around the world who donated money to support us.
We grew from my apartment to a factory in Portland where we employ 14 workers who use fiber-optic-powered lasers to create customizable products, bringing good manufacturing jobs back to Maine.
We were hit hard by COVID. Many of the shops that carried our pocket tools had to close and the trade shows where we marketed them were all cancelled. We knew we had to make a major shift if we were going to survive.
So, like many small business owners, I thought, “What does my community need and how can we address that need?” My wife is a nurse practitioner and told me she and her colleagues could not secure enough masks, which put both health care workers and patients at risk.
So we designed the Snapmask, a washable mask secured with snaps with a contoured shape that prevents glasses from fogging and used our laser cutters to produce them. We started with the simple plan of making and donating some of those masks to health care workers. Now we sell them online and use the U.S. Postal Service to ship them to customers.
The Postal Service is one of the only tools that has allowed independent retailers like Zootility to compete against industry behemoths like Amazon, which uses its virtual monopoly to take advantage of small businesses that sell on its platform. To avoid paying a large cut to Amazon, we sell directly to the consumer and ship through USPS, which has a mandate of “universal service,” to deliver anywhere in the country, no matter how remote. That’s especially crucial in our state, the most rural in the nation. The pandemic has forced countless small businesses like mine to end or drastically limit our retail operations and deliver our products exclusively through the mail.
In the moment when we most depend on the USPS for our survival, Trump is trying to dismantle it. Democrats in Congress have rightly proposed funding for mail-in voting and for the USPS, which would allow us all to vote in the midst of a pandemic without risking our lives. As Trump admitted to Fox Business, he is blocking that funding in order to deny some of us our constitutional right to vote.
That not only threatens our democracy, but also small businesses like mine. When delivery is delayed and consumer expectations are not met, they switch to using giant retailers instead of buying directly. It’s even worse for farmers, who depend on the mail to deliver live baby chicks. Due to deliberate delays, they are seeing their animals die in the mail before they even arrive.
It also endangers countless Mainers who depend on the mail for their prescriptions. The Veterans Administration, which fills 80 percent of its prescriptions by mail, is already having trouble getting veterans their medications. That forces veterans and seniors to go out in public and risk their lives to get their prescriptions.
Why is the Postal Service in such a vulnerable position that Trump can use it to hold our democracy, our small businesses, and our public health hostage?
In 2005, Sen. Susan Collins introduced the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required the USPS to create a massive fund to pay 75 years in advance for its retirement health care costs. That mandate does not apply to other agencies or private companies, and it has cost the agency $119 billion in debt. Intended or not, it had the effect of manufacturing the crisis that the Post Office is now facing.
The Post Office is crucial for our democracy, our public health and our small businesses. Instead of dismantling it, we should support it.
Nate Barr owns Zootility Co. in Portland.