Federal employees doing extraordinary things

And about that talk of privatizing the U.S. Postal Service...

TenaVel T. Thomas – Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This autumn was the 75th annual Arthur S. Flemming Awards, which honors federal employees doing outstanding things.

Among the honorees was Tena Vel T. Thomas, a Senior Executive Port Director of Newark/New York, who “helped to rescue over 130 indentured servants and victims of forced labor.” She is one of the most recent cohort of awardees, who are mostly invisible to the general public and probably most members of Congress.

Another honoree is Dr. Douglas Morton of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. He is an expert on forests and remote fire detection who developed the Amazon Dashboard. It “tracks fire activity to provide real-time information about deforestation fires and forest fires to regional fire managers, firefighters, scientists, and the general public.”

You can read about all of them here.

No, Trump cannot privatize the U.S. Postal Service

I spent chilly Saturday fishing for walleye (see fish pics here), and then enjoyed the evening watching the goofy, old flick, The Cannonball Run with my kids. I slept like a log and awoke Sunday morning hoping to have a peaceful Sunday free from thinking about governance.

Then I saw the Washington Post front page, “Trump explores overhaul of USPS: Privatizing agency is under discussion.” Oy, this is the sort of story that will spark inordinate amounts of stupid online conversation and lots of fundraising emails from leftist organizations (“STOP Trump from privatizing the Postal Service. Donate $25 today…”)

So, off I went to Twitter/X.com to try and throw some cold water on the crazy talk.

I confess, the Washington Post story ticked me off. It was sensationalism from the very first paragraph.

President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.

Um, o.k., let’s start with a basic fact: 39 U.S. Code. This is the section of permanent law that created the Postal Service: “There is established, as an independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States, the United States Postal Service.” Got that? We have a law that created the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) as a government agency, and in our system the only way you change that law is to pass a new law. A president can’t just declare, “I’m going to sell this agency off.”

There also is this small matter: right now, the GOP has the thinnest margin ever in the House of Representatives, and they hold only 53 seats in the Senate. Do the WaPo’s authors really think 100 percent of GOP House members (many of whom come from rural areas dependent on the USPS) will vote for a postal privatization bill? And do you think both of Alaska’s senators are going to support anything that might lessen service to their far flung citizens?

And need I mention that Congress never even voted upon legislation to privatize the USPS? Why, you ask? Because a majority of legislators do not want to.

Adding to my aggravation is that later in the article the authors —having sent readers into a panic or ecstasy— then mumble, “When he returns to office, Trump could have several options to exert control over the mail agency—though he may not have the authority to unilaterally privatize it.”

“May?” No, he does not have the authority to unilaterally privatize it. Full stop.

Once I had read the WaPo I used part of it to wrap the freezer bags holding the walleye fillets. As they say, yesterday’s news is today’s fish wrap.

Polarization waning

How many times have we heard the claim that Donald J. Trump is fanning divisions in America? Certainly, the Man from Mar-a-Lago has dished out his share of insults and spread plenty of bogus theories (Obama’s birth certificate, election thievery, etc.) that has driven lots of people into frenzies.

But while doing all this his latest candidacy has accelerated a reduction in racial polarization between the nation’s two major parties. Harvard law professor Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos writes:

According to the Associated Press’s VoteCast, the share of Black voters supporting Trump increased from 8 percent in 2020 to 16 percent in 2024. Trump’s fraction of the Latino vote rose from 35 percent to 43 percent. The relative stability of the White vote, though, has attracted less attention. Fifty-five percent of White voters backed Trump in 2020, and just one percentage point more did so in 2024. This combination of minority voters shifting rightward and White voters staying put resulted in the lowest level of racially polarized voting in a generation.

Yay, right?

And Professor Stephanopoulos notes that general voter polarization seems to be declining. Of course, whether these shifts in voter animal spirits are enduring remains to be seen.