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We’re cur­rent­ly get­ting a vivid, painful reminder of why we need a pub­lic sec­tor. The col­lapse of pub­lic ser­vices, in par­tic­u­lar the pro­vi­sion of pub­lic health, has tor­pe­doed the entire econ­o­my as a dead­ly pan­dem­ic rav­ages the coun­try. The end of the road in our cur­rent devo­lu­tion may be the assault on one of our old­est pub­lic insti­tu­tions — the ven­er­a­ble and very pop­u­lar U.S. Postal Service.

The inter­net has come to take on much of how we com­mu­ni­cate in the 21^st Cen­tu­ry, but the fact remains that Amer­i­cans still rely heav­i­ly on the deliv­ery of phys­i­cal cor­re­spon­dence. And it’s not just assis­tance checks and life-sav­ing med­ica­tion, all kinds of com­merce in pri­vate goods is facil­i­tat­ed to a sig­nif­i­cant extent by the Postal Service’s pack­age deliv­ery. Trans­port of peri­od­i­cals, the busi­ness of non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tions, and now the very fea­si­bil­i­ty of our nation­al elec­tions, also all depend on a well-func­tion­ing Postal Service.

There has been a cas­cade of well-found­ed furor over Pres­i­dent Trump’s bla­tant sab­o­tage of the mail in order to ben­e­fit him polit­i­cal­ly. But focus­ing only on Trump’s cur­rent attacks obscures the bipar­ti­san, neolib­er­al roots of the cur­rent crisis.

Fol­low­ing the U.S. postal strike of 1970, Con­gress—includ­ing Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats — passed the Postal Reor­ga­ni­za­tion Act, which sep­a­rat­ed the agency from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment as an inde­pen­dent, qua­si-pub­lic cor­po­ra­tion. One upside of the change was that postal work­ers won col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing rights, and the ser­vice was large­ly able to func­tion and escape con­tro­ver­sy for decades after­wards. Yet it also ensured that the Postal Ser­vice would be run ​“like a business.”

The 1990s were a peri­od of retrench­ment in the pub­lic sec­tor. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton declared, ​“The era of Big Gov­ern­ment is over.” Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore cru­sad­ed to ​“rein­vent gov­ern­ment.” The admin­is­tra­tion boast­ed of its efforts to reduce the num­ber of fed­er­al employ­ees, and pri­va­ti­za­tion and shrink­ing of cer­tain pub­lic ser­vices became the cause-cele­bre. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Lead­er­ship Coun­cil, also known as ​‘New Democ­rats,’ put much of their faith in mar­kets rather than government.

It could not have been sur­pris­ing that the neolib­er­al gun­sights lat­er became trained on the U.S. Postal Ser­vice. Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion alum­na Elaine Kamar­ck, a leader in Al Gore’s rein­vent­ing gov­ern­ment project, sub­se­quent­ly called for pri­va­ti­za­tion of the Postal Ser­vice.

In 2012, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s for­mer head of the Office of Man­age­ment and Bud­get, Peter Orszag, also advo­cat­ed pri­va­ti­za­tion of the Postal Ser­vice. Among the Oba­ma administration’s laps­es was the fail­ure to appoint its own major­i­ty to the Postal Ser­vice Board of Gov­er­nors (BoG). Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Obama’s fail­ure to exer­cise his appoint­ment pow­er was a pat­tern that affect­ed mul­ti­ple gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions. Postal Ser­vice employ­ment itself was reduced by almost 20 per­cent dur­ing Obama’s time in office.

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