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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Anyone got a non-intuited, horses-mouth reason why? I suspect (ie, intuit) that its actually an attack on the USPS, not on China. The party of government doesn't like the post office, and this is to teach us not to like the post office either.

I guess if they stopped using electric cars, they might like the post office again.

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A huge portion of USPS international package volume is “ePackets” from China. These are a special service provided by USPS since 2011 for Chinese/HK goods that are cheaper and faster than normal USPS international shipping.

These ePackets are then bundled up into big sacks that are basically not inspected at all at US international mail facilities due to the de minimis exemption, which was just rolled back. The special status granted to ePackets meant that the volume shipped grew far beyond the processing capacity for normal packages at US IMFs. This pause (and subsequent unpause) from USPS on packages from China is because they don’t know how they’re going to handle that volume if it isn’t given special status.

Source: I worked on a project adjacent to this a couple of years ago. Close enough to pick up the basics but this isn’t quite what I was working on, so take my comment with a grain of salt.

Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.

And forgo the revenue? Or, do the other carriers do a better job of meeting the imposts?

It’s a govt service, they are not trying to meet wall street quarterly shareholder expectations

It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point. It started in 1970 with the Postal Reorganization Act, which transformed it from a government department to an independent government entity that was expected to fund its operations entirely through its own revenue. Then in 2006, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the PAEA which required the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits seventy-five years into the future¹. Congress even restricted the USPS's ability to set its own rates, expand its services or close unprofitable locations without political interference.

¹ The retiree funding requirement was only changed recently when Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 into law.

> It's worth noting that Congress has been trying to force the USPS to run itself like a self-sustaining business for decades at this point.

That's the narrative, but this was always a blatant bid to destroy the USPS. There's simply no other explanation.

USPS does more or less teeter on the edge of solvent and sustainable depending on how you measure and when you measure. All things considered, I think that's pretty damn good. Pretty much no other government service can claim that. I think the retiree funding requirement is/was dumb and an unnecessary handicap but the way USPS runs itself should be a model for other government services. The only reason we don't look at USPS as a massive success is because the idiot left brains want it to be run like a charity and the idiot right brains want it gone entirely.

> Pretty much no other government service can claim that.

Sure there are, they just don't get the air time and political attention. Examples I'm familiar with: The minerals, oil, and gas regulatory agencies bring in billions of dollars. A single lease sale in the gulf would make BOEM as an agency incredibly profitable but instead the money just goes up to the federal government and is redistributed. National Parks already collect entry fees and the NPS could easily raise those prices to meet or exceed agency expenses, public demand would almost certainly pay it, and they could also teeter like the USPS. Social Security, if it were never fucked with, would have more money from just interest than most country's GDPs but we've robbed that piggy bank numerous times already.

> And forgo the revenue?

There's no revenue. The postage fees you pay (if you pay them) on Chinese goods are paid to China Post (or whatever Chinese shipping company), and USPS doesn't see a cent of it. And still has to deal with a frankly insane amount of packages from China.

It's not just a US problem. PostNord (Scandinavia) imposed a mandatory fee on all packages arriving from China until they reached an agreement with China Post (?) to get some of the money people pay for shipping

Sorry I responded to a comment which mentioned duty assessment. If this UPU/international postal union settlement rate stuff, that's not duty, it's a global model for cost reconciliation.

> Getting rid of de minimus exemptions made it impossible to assess duty on the volume of packages coming in. So they just won’t accept packages at all.

Doing an inspection is going to take a moderately well paid government employee a little bit of their time. I'd be very, very surprised if the cost of their labor is less, in expectation, than the tariff collected on the average de minimus shipment from China.

DHL/FedEx do lots of declaration/tax work for imported packages. More often than not, they inspects the package before sealing.

USPS don't -- they simply forward from HongKongPost or ChinaPost. If the local post office in HK or CN does not cooperation, they can't do anything.

So, they don't check for fentanyl? Might explain the move. I remember ordering some prescription drugs from India, which is, I think, illegal. It arrived to local post office, so I guess, USPS.

Here in Norway, customs works tightly with the courier companies and postal service. They even have their own booth at the major postal hub, which processes all postal shipments from abroad.

I am doubtful that would explain it, though it may be offered as an explanation: don't you remember Trump just pardoned the founder of the drugs by mail organization silk road to pump his crypto?

From Reuters...

>"In our view, the USPS would require some time to sort out how to execute the new taxes before allowing Chinese packages to arrive in the U.S. again," said Chelsey Tam, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/u-s-postal-service-places-...

> The Trump administration this week imposed a 10% tariff on all goods from China and banned all low-value, e-commerce parcels from receiving duty-free benefits under the de minimis entry program. The administration said the emergency order is part of its strategy to stop the illegal shipment of fentanyl and precursor chemicals into the United States."

> The administration said the emergency order is part of its strategy to stop the illegal shipment of fentanyl and precursor chemicals into the United States."

Lol said out of their mouth while he was pardoning the head of the Silk Road underground/darkweb drug distribution organization to pump his crypto.

Never accuse this regime of hypocrisy, you'll run into apologists real quick on this platform.

The illegal Fentanyl precursor industry didn't donate enough to his PAC. /s

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