Understanding Government

Federal prosecutors and postal workers have an eye for fake art. Prosecutors indicted a Chicago art dealer and gallery owner for selling $480,000 worth of phony works that the dealer claimed were done by masters like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dali, reports the Chicago Sun-Times’ Frank Main. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service says that thousands of fake paintings were dumped onto the market in a scheme that also involved a New York art distributor. The works were mainly sold online.

Now this is thinking differently.  John Nichols of The Nation looks at the U.S. Postal Service and sees not a feeble, dying, unprofitable bureaucracy but instead a highly effective and dependable public institution that could help pave the way for a different financial and information infrastructure across the U.S.  Examples?  (more…)

Another in Understanding Government’s “Public Service Announcement” series profiling the careers and challenges of notable government employees

By Norman Kelley

Quick! What agency of the federal government, other than the Defense Dept., has over 200,000 vehicles and is a major consumer of energy resources? Still don’t have a clue? Hint: it helped you enjoy your holiday by delivering cards and gifts during the past few weeks, and has been considered the most trusted government agency in an age of anti-government suspicion.

Yes, it is the United States Postal Service (USPS), one of the earliest public agencies established by the government, and one of the very few to be explicitly authorized by the U.S. Constitution. Unlike most government agencies, it does not derive its budget from taxation and has been financially self-sufficient since the 1970s, when it was reorganized from the Post Office Department, a cabinet-level agency, into the United States Postal service, one of the sixty-five independent agencies or corporations and the only agency to survive solely on its own revenues.

With 656,000 workers, the USPS is the second-largest U.S. civilian employer after Wal-Mart. It has a large fleet of vehicles – over 200,000 – consuming an estimated fuel budget of $2.4 billion.

Carolyn Cole

An agency with this much property faces heavy costs for energy.  Helping to make sure that the USPS reduces its energy consumption, along with its carbon footprint, is Carolyn C. Cole, manager of the Postal Service’s Energy Initiatives group. A Washingtonian born and bred, Cole, who reports to Sam Pulcrano, the USPS’s vice president for sustainability, defines her job as “validating and quantifying” her agency’s energy consumption.

“You can’t measure what you can’t manage,” she told Understanding Government. “I develop strategies to reduce our energy consumption.” (more…)