SAM GRAVES COLUMN

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It used to be that when you sent a letter to your neighbor down the road, it went to your local post office, got sorted, and delivered to your neighbor quickly. Sadly, that’s just not the way it works anymore.

In the name of efficiency and cost cutting, the Postal Service over the years has consolidated mail sorting to huge processing centers, like the ones in Kansas City and St. Louis. That means that your letter gets picked up, shipped to one of these centers, sorted, returned to your local post office, and then delivered. At face value, that entire idea sounds crazy. How is it more efficient to truck stuff back and forth, rather than sorting it in the local post office?

Well, the idea is that the trucks have to run back and forth from the local post offices anyway and automating the process at larger facilities makes it more efficient. That’s the idea, anyway. The problem is that these processing centers aren’t exactly the poster child for efficiency and reliability—they’ve become unaccountable black holes where mail goes to get lost or ping-ponged to different facilities all over the country before making it where it needs to go.

As a result, we’ve seen ballots show up late, lifesaving prescriptions get lost, and I don’t know how many folks I’ve heard from who had their property tax bills or payments go missing. The list of problems is nearly endless and it’s unacceptable.

I called for an Inspector General investigation of the processing center in St. Louis to get to the bottom of these issues. That investigation finally took place over the last three months and it is stunning.

In just two days in June at the St. Louis distribution facility, almost 2.6 million pieces of mail were delayed. If that wasn’t bad enough, they only reported around 1.5 million pieces as delayed. They weren’t even reporting the missed mail correctly! On top of that, over 50 percent of all outbound mail trips from the STL processing facility from May 2024 – April 2025 were late or canceled. The Inspector General said this was one of the worst processing centers they’d seen—and that’s saying something.

It turns out management was at fault. They simply weren’t doing their jobs. They need to go, and we need to get new management in place at the St. Louis facility.

It’s not just St. Louis though. We called for an audit in Kansas City, and that was completed last year. Their issues are similar. Late and canceled trips out of the processing center were above 50 percent as well at the time. We know what the problems are. Now it’s time to fix them.

To be clear, this isn’t on our local carriers. They do a great job but they can’t deliver the mail if it doesn’t get to them. That’s completely unacceptable and not fair to them.

The Postal Service can no longer deny or downplay the horrific state of the mail in North Missouri. Something has got to change. It’s time for an overhaul. We need the mail delivered once again, and on time, and USPS needs to make it happen sooner rather than later.