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As ballot surge starts, a USPS attaboy from its global colleagues

Postal Service

Postal workers have been buffeted by safety, financial and political challenges during he pandemic.

Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

The Postal Service got a little uplifting news Thursday, after having faced quite a bit of guff lately over its readiness to handle this fall's deluge of election mail.

The United Nations agency that sets global postal rules and policies, the Universal Postal Union, declared the USPS the seventh best postal service in the world. That's actually up one notch from last year's ratings.

The high score may offer a psychological balm to postal workers, buffeted by months of bad headlines and lawsuits about service cuts suspected of being designed to slow the pandemic-fueled flow of tens of millions of absentee presidential ballots.


But it is highly unlikely to mollify President Trump. Not only does he continue to derided the USPS as a shoddy operation that's been duped into supporting massive voter fraud, but he's long threatened to withdraw the United States from the treaty that created the U.N. agency because he says it hobbles American trade.

The postal union rankings of services in 170 countries relied on an ocean of data to measure each postal system's reliability (speed and accuracy of delivery), reach (breadth and depth of operations), relevance (intensity of demand) and resilience (diversity of revenue sources and capacity to innovate).

Switzerland tops the rankings, followed by Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and France. The USPS was next with its 83.47 score a full 5.5 points better than last year.

The biggest factor affecting postal service around the world, of course, is the coronavirus pandemic, the report says. "At the time of writing this report, the connectivity of the international network has not yet been fully restored," the report concludes.

The report was issued hours after the latest bit of bad election-related news for the Postal Service: The arrest of a New Jersey postal worker Wednesday on charges he poured nearly 100 mail-in ballots into a dumpster near his house rather than deliver them to voters. The state is among half a dozen that have switched the general election to mostly mail-in for this year only to minimize the public's Covid-19 risks.

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Mad About Politics? Blame Congress

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders celebrate after the vote on President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 3, 2025.

Yuri Gripas/Abaca Press/TNS

Mad About Politics? Blame Congress

The judiciary isn’t supposed to be the primary check on the executive, the legislative branch is.

Whatever you think about American politics and government, whether you are on the right, the left or somewhere in the middle, you should be mad at Congress. I don’t just mean the Republican-controlled Congress — though, by all means, be mad at them — I mean the institution as a whole.

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Jennifer Greenfield Speaks Out for Colorado Families

Jennifer Greenfield Speaks Out for Colorado Families

When Jennifer Greenfield wrote an op-ed in The Denver Post warning that proposed federal budget cuts would devastate Coloradans who rely on programs like Medicaid and SNAP, she hoped her words might help change the conversation—and the outcome. Her piece drew a wave of responses, including appreciation from state leaders and an invitation to speak at a local event. Although the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” ultimately became law, Greenfield continues to warn about its long-term consequences. She spoke with SSN about the ripple effects of her op-ed and shared advice for fellow scholars who want their research to make a difference. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q&A with Jennifer Greenfield

You recently wrote an op-ed about the GOP’s budget bill. What message were you hoping to get across?

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U.S. Capitol

James Madison foresaw factions tearing apart democracy. Today’s Congress, driven by partisanship and money, proves his warning true.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Our Amazing, Shrinking Congress

James Madison tried to warn us. He foresaw a grave danger to our fragile republic. No, it wasn’t an overreaching, dictatorial President. It was the people’s representatives themselves who might shred the untested constitutional fabric of the nascent United States.

Members of Congress could destroy it by neglecting the good of the country in favor of narrow, self-serving ends. Unity would collapse into endless internecine strife. Madison sounded this alarm in Federalist No. 10: he foresaw the inevitable emergence of “factions”—political parties “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

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Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who's the Most Patriotic of All?

Trump and the MAGA movement have twisted the meaning of patriotism. It’s time we collectively reclaim America’s founding ideals and the Pledge’s promise.

Getty Images, LeoPatrizi

Mirror, Mirror On the Wall, Who's the Most Patriotic of All?

Republicans have always claimed to be the patriotic party, the party of "America, right or wrong," the party willing to use force to protect American national interests abroad, the party of a strong military. In response, Democrats have not really contested this perspective since Vietnam, basically ceding the patriotic badge to the Republicans.

But with the advent of Donald Trump, the Republican claim to patriotism has gotten broader and more troubling. Republicans now claim to be the party that is true to our founding principles. And it is not just the politicians; they have support from far-right scholars at the Heritage Foundation, such as Matthew Spalding. The Democratic Party has done nothing to counter these claims.

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