As I wrote in April, the dark fate facing the U.S. Postal Service today was evident months ago. For years, it has struggled to stay afloat despite a congressional mandate that it front load retiree medical benefits 75 years forward — something that private corporations like UPS and FedEx need not do. Republican politicians’ years-old attacks on Postal Service inefficiencies are unfair. It is a creature of statute, not free markets. But this month is different for the USPS, because Trump’s hauling off truckloads of U.S. neighborhoods’ familiar blue mail boxes and removing sorting machines from processing facilities carries no pretense of justification. Once again, America is facing the ubiquitous question of the Trump presidency: His actions are terrible policy, but are they lawless, too?
