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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Your post shows how little you understand the USPS.
A) It wasn't the scaling down of the USPS that is what Trump did. He appointed the head of the org, Louis DeJoy, who did a lot of specific acts that slowed down how mail was delivered. He got rid of over 700 high-speed auto-sort machines that were perfectly fine but out of date and then didn't order new ones. He cut overtime and lowered the opening hours of offices.
B) The only reason the USPS is having financial issues is because the Republicans passed a law (which many Dems also voted for because they are morons and the plan sounded good at first read) that said all pensions had to be pre-funded through death. That means for every person who works there and has a pension, let's say being paid $500/mo for the rest of their life, will require the USPS to have a fully funded account in the amount of $500/mo x 12 mo x life expectancy. They can't do like every other company on Earth with a pension and fund it over time either through profits or by an interest bearing account. That crippled the USPS because they had to divert all their profits. Before that they were profitable, but this stifled all growth.
C) Even with that, they finally came back and made $56 billion in PROFIT in 2022. Yes, in 2023 they had a loss of $6 billion, but the profit from 2022 helped them to not scale back.
D) USPS doesn't make most of their money on first class mail. The majority of their income is from package delivery ($32.4 billion) and from mailing advertisements ($15.9 billion) vs first class mail revenue of $24.5 billion.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2023/1114-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2023-results.htm
The reason that they needed to be pre-funded is because the USPS was shrinking and is expected to continue to do so.
What happens with a private company that's shrinking or going under is that people who have a pension plan risk winding up without their pension.
With the USPS, it's a quasi-governmental agency. Strictly-speaking, the government isn't on the hook for the pensions...but it's a pretty good bet that if the USPS can't cover pensions, then USPS workers are going to be asking the government to cover it down the road. This ensures that it's the USPS that pays for it, rather than it running up a huge debt, filing for bankruptcy, and then dumping it on the taxpayer.
The bill required all pensions to be prefunded for 50 years. Even pensions for people who were at retirement age and couldn't possibly last 50 years, and people who have just started and might not stay long enough to qualify for a pension also needed to have a prefunded 50 year pension. That's ridiculous. No other government organization has this requirement, and no other non-government organization has this requirement. So why would the quasi-governmental need one?
Also, USPS was profitable in 2006. While maybe not growing, they weren't going under. This was purely a political move to turn a profitable USPS and make it crash so that private companies like FedEx and UPS could take over the role to make money. Bush Jr used scare tactics to get liberals to vote for this, like the arguments you are using. Thankfully, Biden repealed this law in 2022.