For most of its 244-year exis­tence, the Unit­ed States Postal Ser­vice (USPS) was wide­ly con­sid­ered as an inno­v­a­tive pow­er­house bind­ing the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment togeth­er. Alex­is de Toc­queville, the French diplo­mat who toured Amer­i­ca in the 1830s, called it a ​“great link between minds.” Dur­ing World War I, the post office teamed with the Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture to insti­tute a ​“Farm to Table” pro­gram to help dis­trib­ute pro­duce and oth­er nutri­ent-rich foods across the coun­try. Today, USPS stands as Amer­i­cans’ favorite fed­er­al agency.

True modernization would expand the agency’s ability to serve the common good, not undermine it.

Since the 1970s, how­ev­er, a com­bi­na­tion of finan­cial woes and polit­i­cal attacks have wound­ed the post office. What would it take to return USPS to a pio­neer­ing force capa­ble of address­ing our country’s mul­ti­ple crises? Why not lever­age the near­ly 250,000 let­ter car­ri­ers and over 30,000 post offices that blan­ket all 50 states for more than just mail deliv­ery? Why not expand the work­force and pres­ence of the Amer­i­can public’s most favored gov­ern­ment agency?

With mega com­pa­nies like Ama­zon vying for the future of deliv­ery, and con­ser­v­a­tives increas­ing­ly call­ing for pri­va­ti­za­tion, the U.S. Postal Ser­vice needs a makeover, not a dismantling.

In an era of lit­tle faith in gov­ern­ment, a reimag­ined postal ser­vice could demon­strate how pub­lic solu­tions can solve many of our col­lec­tive prob­lems, from cli­mate change to a preda­to­ry finan­cial indus­try. That’s exact­ly what the post office did in the country’s ear­ly days.

As jour­nal­ist Winifred Gal­lagher describes in her 2016 book How the Post Office Cre­at­ed Amer­i­ca, uni­ver­sal mail ser­vice helped spark a com­mu­ni­ca­tions rev­o­lu­tion rival­ing that of the tele­graph through slash­ing the price of cor­re­spon­dence and buoy­ing west­ward expan­sion. The 1792 Postal Act effec­tive­ly under­wrote news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion, spread­ing nation­al and glob­al news across the new­ly formed states and territories.

In 1897, a res­i­dent of the Ari­zona Ter­ri­to­ry wrote to the Post­mas­ter Gen­er­al, ​“I am more than ever proud of being an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. I live three and a half miles from the Tempe post office, and have been sick for a week past, yet my mail is brought to my door every morn­ing, except Sun­day.” The abo­li­tion­ist John Brown served as a local post­mas­ter before mak­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to eman­ci­pa­tion, just as did Abra­ham Lincoln.

But by 2001, as first-class mail usage began to decline, and scares of anthrax increased fol­low­ing the 9⁄ 11 ter­ror­ist attacks, USPS’s finan­cial loss­es were grow­ing. Five years lat­er, the Repub­li­can-con­trolled Con­gress passed the Postal Account­abil­i­ty and Enhance­ment Act, lim­it­ing its abil­i­ty to inno­vate beyond the deliv­ery of mail and pack­ages, just as the inter­net began to boom. The law also required the agency, which receives no tax­pay­er dol­lars, to make annu­al pay­ments of $5.5 bil­lion for ten years to fund the health­care of its future retirees. Today, the postal ser­vice con­tin­ues to bleed mon­ey despite deliv­er­ing more pack­ages than ever due to e‑commerce.

As calls for pri­va­ti­za­tion mount, the agency still man­ages to inno­vate with­in its lim­it­ed man­date. Let­ter car­ri­ers deliv­er ​“last mile” parcels for FedEx and UPS, help­ing keep both cor­po­ra­tions’ ser­vices afford­able. The agency has also built the world’s largest gantry robot­ic fleet, which moves 314,000 mail trays per day.

Hand­ing over the keys to the pri­vate sec­tor would run counter to USPS’s stat­ed pur­pose of con­nect­ing every Amer­i­can home and busi­ness, no mat­ter how remote. Pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions, fol­low­ing the whims of the mar­ket, would like­ly charge more for deliv­ery in less dense, rur­al areas, while pric­ing out low-income res­i­dents everywhere.

True mod­ern­iza­tion would expand the agency’s abil­i­ty to serve the com­mon good, not under­mine it.

Post office loca­tions could pro­vide free Wi-Fi access, com­put­ers with access to gov­ern­ment ser­vices, print­ers, and pub­lic meet­ing rooms. Clerks could pro­vide dri­vers’ license renew­al, mul­ti­lin­gual trans­la­tion, help with immi­gra­tion pro­cess­ing and oth­er ser­vices. The Amer­i­can Postal Work­ers Union (APWU) has pro­posed expand­ing vote by mail, pro­vid­ing fol­low-up cen­sus ser­vices, and notary, among oth­er services.

The build­ings them­selves could be used to extend broad­band infra­struc­ture and be fit­ted with green tech­nol­o­gy like solar pan­els, elec­tric car charg­ing sta­tions and rooftop farms. USPS’s Los Ange­les mail pro­cess­ing facil­i­ty has 31,000 solar pan­els, mak­ing it one of the city’s largest build­ings gen­er­at­ing elec­tric­i­ty through solar. Depend­ing on their loca­tion, some build­ings could even be rebuilt as com­mu­ni­ty-con­trolled, mixed-use devel­op­ment, to include afford­able housing.

USPS could also return to pro­vid­ing afford­able bank­ing ser­vices, as it did from 1911 to 1967. In addi­tion to the inter­na­tion­al and domes­tic mon­ey orders it already sells, the post office could allow Amer­i­cans to col­lect sav­ings, cash pay­checks, trans­fer mon­ey elec­tron­i­cal­ly and pay bills. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) and Rep. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) recent­ly intro­duced such postal bank­ing leg­is­la­tion aimed at curb­ing preda­to­ry lend­ing prac­tices. Such a move would help catch the coun­try up with the rest of the world: Less than 10% of post offices across the globe do not cur­rent­ly offer basic finan­cial services.

None of these ideas are as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as it was to blan­ket the coun­try with post offices. Yet, a tru­ly mod­ern postal ser­vice would be more than the sum of its parts. It would help restore con­fi­dence in the pub­lic sector’s role in serv­ing the com­mon good, at a time when faith in gov­ern­ment seems so hard to come by.