Post office changes began way before Trump was sworn in

[Legion]

DEMOCRATS ARE BOUGHT & PAID FOR BY GOVERNMENT UNIONS

PUBLISHED: February 15, 2013 at 4:01 a.m. | UPDATED: August 12, 2016


All but five of Congress’s 255 DEMOCRATS and independents received campaign donations from postal worker union groups in the past six years, raising the political risk of Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe’s move to end Saturday mail delivery.

Political action committees for the seven postal unions contributed $9.6 million from 2007 to 2012 to current members of Congress, 91 percent of it to DEMOCRATS and two independents who caucus with them, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

DEMOCRATS control the U.S. Senate, which must agree to most of the changes Donahoe says are needed to save the Postal Service from insolvency. Many of his proposals are intended to reduce labor costs accounting for 80 percent of the service’s expenses.

That puts Donahoe in conflict with post office unions, which would lose most of the estimated 22,500 jobs that would be cut if Saturday delivery ends, and have spent years making friends on Capitol Hill.

“That’s why it’s been so hard to come up with a plan for the Postal Service,” said Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based watchdog group. “The obvious thing you want to do is cut back on the number of employees, cut back on services, cut back on benefits. That’s something DEMOCRATS haven’t wanted to do because of the support they’ve gotten from the unions.”

Donahoe is trying to cut $20 billion a year in costs after the Postal Service, in the face of declining mail volume due in part to e-mail and online commerce, lost $15.9 billion last fiscal year and an additional $1.3 billion in the quarter that ended Dec. 31.

The postmaster general stood by his position that ending Saturday mail delivery in August is legal, even though appropriations bills for three decades have required six-day mail, with the government operating under temporary funding.

Senate DEMOCRATS including Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada insist they, not Donahoe, get to decide on ending Saturday delivery.

The Senate passed a measure last year that gave Donahoe some of what he wanted, while blocking him from ending Saturday mail delivery for at least two years. The House didn’t vote on that measure or its own plan.

“It may be in the public interest to curtail Saturday mail delivery, but the decision may not be made in economic interests but in the interest of who their friends are,” said Gary Chaison, a labor professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

Every elected member of the Senate DEMOCRAT caucus has received contributions from postal union political committees, the records show. Of the 55 Senate Democrats, only Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Mo Cowan of Massachusetts, who were appointed, haven’t received donations from at least one postal union PAC. By comparison, 19 of the Senate’s 45 Republican got postal contributions.

Stephen Lynch, a DEMOCRAT House member from Massachusetts running in the special election to fill new Secretary of State John Kerry’s Senate seat, received the most among House members in the past six years. Lynch, whose mother was a postal clerk and father was an ironworker, received $175,100 from postal PACs, the records show.

A campaign spokesman, Conor Yunits, said the lawmaker has always been close to postal and ironworkers unions because of his parents. “He’s very proud to have that support and these organizations have always been very important to his family,” Yunits said.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., received $96,500 in contributions to lead all senators, though his figures also include donations to his House campaigns in 2008 and 2010.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a co-sponsor last year of the legislation that would have required waiting at least two years to end Saturday mail delivery, received $70,500, more postal union donations than any Republican in Congress. Calls to Collins’s office over two days weren’t returned.

In the House, 197 out of 200 DEMOCRATS received postal union PAC donations.

The biggest postal-union donor was the National Association of Letter Carriers, which trailed only the American Federation of Teachers among union political committees in campaign giving for the 2012 elections.

DEMOCRATS say they’re concerned about the impact of postal service changes on employees.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top DEMOCRAT on Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said 45 percent of Postal Service employees are minorities, 40 percent are women and 21 percent are veterans. Some might not be able to find other work if they lose their jobs, he said.

“Our main concern is compassion for those who have given their blood, sweat and tears to make our mail system work,” Cummings said.

Union officials including Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, say most proposed cuts aren’t necessary because the Postal Service’s financial woes stem from its legal requirement to prepay costs of future retirees’ health benefits.

The service has defaulted on those payments for the past two years, $11.1 billion in all, and last week said it won’t be able to afford this year’s payment.

“It’s clear that eliminating Saturday delivery would hurts tens of millions of Americans and countless small businesses while not addressing the financial problems,” Rolando said in an e-mailed statement.

Donahoe has asked Congress to restructure or end that requirement, while seeking to close hundreds of post offices and mail-handling plants and to pull postal workers out of the U.S. government employees’ health plan.

Lawmakers opposing cuts say they’re voicing constituents’ sentiments.

Jon Tester of Montana, who received $65,000 in postal union donations, fourth most among Senate DEMOCRATS, on Wednesday called the Postal Service “absolutely critical” to the rural areas he represents.

Postal workers, of which there are 521,000, are among those constituents.

The Postal Service’s work force is larger than that of any publicly traded U.S.-based company other than Wal-Mart Stores.

Jeanette Dwyer, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, said the contributions help the union motivate its members to lobby their representatives. “It’s a grassroots tool,” she said.

The postal unions are also mobilizing allies including MoveOn.org, which started a petition drive demanding Congress prevent closings of small-town post offices.

“The union money is less important than the fact that there are union members everywhere,” said Art Sackler, coordinator of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, whose members include Bank of America and eBay and which supports cutting postal costs. “And there are relatives of union members everywhere. And they all care.”

Still, Issa said, cutbacks are inevitable.

“We’re going to ultimately all get to a numerically smaller Postal Service,” he said.



https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/02/15/postal-union-donations-to-democrats-complicate-service-cuts/

[Legion]

POWERFUL UNIONS FUND THE DEMOCRATS THROUGH PACS, & YOU PAY FOR IT

December 5, 2011



USPS is slashing first-class delivery, cutting billions of dollars, and looking to cut thousands of workers. How did it get this bad?

Today, the Postal Service announced roughly $3 billion in service cuts that will slow down the delivery of first-class mail for the first time in 40 years. Starting in April, it plans to shutter more than half of its 461 mail processing centers, stretching out the time it will take to ship everything. One-day delivery of stamped envelopes will all but certainly become a thing of the past.

The announcement is just the latest sign of a sad and increasingly dire fact: the Postal Service is in shambles. This past fiscal year, it lost a mere $5.1 billion. In 2012, it's facing a record $14.1 billion shortfall and possible bankruptcy. In order to turn a profit, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says the agency needs to cut $20 billion from its annual budget by 2015. That's almost a third of its yearly costs.

How did it come to this? The culprits include the Internet, labor expenses, and, as with pretty much every problem our country faces now, Congress.

Although total mail volume stayed relatively steady until 2006, it has dropped an astonishing 20 percent in the past five years. More important, first-class mail, the Postal Service's biggest moneymaker, has fallen 25 percent during the past decade. That's a huge problem for its bottom line. The agency now delivers far more "standard mail" -- what most of us call junk mail -- than first-class mail. According to Businessweek, it takes three pieces of junk to equal the earnings from a single stamped first-class envelope. J. Crew catalogs and pizza menus alone won't pay the bills.

Yet even as its profits have dwindled along with the mail it handles, the agency's labor costs have remained stubbornly high.

Salaries and benefits make up 80 percent of the Post Office's budget.

By comparison, FedEx spends 43 percent of its budget on labor, while UPS spends 63 percent, according to Businessweek.

Why the disparity? As the magazine put it, "USPS has historically placed the interests of its unions first." For years, it has happily negotiated contracts with generous salary increases and no-layoff clauses.

That seems to finally be changing. As part of his budget-cutting campaign, Donahoe is looking to slash roughly 220,000 of the Postal Service's 653,000 employees. About 100,000 of those cuts would happen through attrition. Meanwhile, Donahoe has asked Congress for permission to break the no-layoff provision of the service's current contracts so it can let go the additional 120,000.

The key words there, of course, are permission from Congress.

The Postal Service as we know it today was created in 1970. The Postal Service Reorganization Act was intended to transform the mail system from a dysfunctional dumping ground for political patronage into a self-sustaining, independent agency. It was told, in other words, to act like a business.

But the politicians never really let it. The Postal Service doesn't receive any taxpayer dollars, funding itself entirely through customer revenue. But it still has to deal with Congress as a micromanager. It isn't allowed to shutter post offices for purely economic reasons, meaning that roughly 25,000 of its 32,000 now operate at a loss. It needs permission for rate hikes from a special regulatory commission. And for 30 years, it's been required to deliver mail on Saturdays, even though that day is a money loser.

The Postal Service's current woes are also due at least in part to Capitol Hill's meddling. In 2006, Congress passed a new law requiring the agency to pay about $5.5 billion a year into a trust fund for future retiree health benefits. When revenues were rising, the idea might have seemed reasonable. But the timing was exquisitely bad. Now that the agency is in the red, the pension burden has helped to force drastic measures like the ones we've heard about today.

The Postal Service is begging Congress to ease up on the prepayment requirement, return part of its overfunded pension obligations, and give it more flexibility to manage its business. But, surprise surprise, gridlock could doom its efforts. Separate bills have passed House and Senate committees that would try to help the Postal Service avoid bankruptcy.

But the two pieces of legislation have significant differences. For instance, the House version would let the post office end Saturday deliveries immediately. The Senate version forces the Postal Service to wait two years and try alternative cost-saving measures first. It's unclear if the two chambers will reach a compromise.


https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/who-killed-the-postal-service/249508/


DEMOCRATS controlled the 111th Congress (2009–2011) with majorities in both houses of Congress alongside DEMOCRAT B. Hussein Obama.

[Charoite]

[Legion]

Mar 24, 2011

The U.S. Postal Service announced Thursday that it will reduce its workforce with layoffs and offers of buyouts and will close seven district offices...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-postal-service-announces-sweeping-job-cuts-district-office-closures/2011/03/24/ABu3EpRB_story.html

[Legion]

Dec 5, 2011

Officials Monday unveiled proposed changes to close hundreds of mail processing facilities...


https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/post/postal-service-cuts-will-mean-slower-mail/2011/12/05/gIQAroYfVO_blog.html

[Legion]

03/04/14


White House seeks cuts to USPS services in budget


President Obama would allow the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service to scrap Saturday delivery and delay some required healthcare payments, under proposals in the White House’s 2015 budget.

Obama’s previous budgets have had similar ideas for how to shore up USPS, which lost $5 billion in fiscal 2013.

But several of the proposals floated by Obama have also generally been embraced more by Republicans than DEMOCRATS and postal unions.




https://thehill.com/policy/finance/199904-white-house-seeks-cuts-to-usps-services-in-budget

[Legion]

Dec. 5, 2011



The United States Postal Service said it planned to largely eliminate next-day delivery for first-class mail as part of its push to cut costs and reduce its budget.




https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/business/cuts-by-postal-service-will-slow-first-class-mail.html

[Legion]

February 3, 2015

As New Postal Leader Takes Charge, Obama Calls for Major USPS Reforms



President Obama renewed his longstanding call to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service in his fiscal 2016 budget, saying the agency must be reformed to ensure its future viability.

Just one day after the Postal Service swore in its new postmaster general -- Megan Brennan -- Obama called for sweeping changes to modernize the cash-strapped agency, which the White House said would save a total of $36 billion over 11 years.

Obama’s recommendations borrowed from recent legislative proposals that have failed to make their way through Congress, pulling no punches on the most controversial elements of postal reform.

Obama proposed the Postal Service cut Saturday mail delivery after volume declines to a level the White House expects USPS to hit in late 2018, a structure similar to the one put forward last Congress by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del.

The president’s plan would also allow USPS to phase out to-the-door delivery in favor of centralized or curbside delivery, while codifying the current policy of not closing rural post offices.

The White House pitched increasing revenue by providing postal management with more flexibility in creating new business opportunities, as well as boosting cooperation with state and local governments to offer services at post offices.

Additionally, the budget plan called for making permanent the emergency price increase set to expire this year.

The Obama administration has included similar postal reform measures in previous budgets.

Also on Monday, newly sworn in Postmaster General Brennan sent a letter to employees: “We have a lot of momentum as an organization today,” Brennan wrote, “despite our financial challenges. We continue to take prudent steps to bring our costs and revenues into better alignment. However, the way we are structured today and the way we serve the public today will not be adequate to fully meet the demands of tomorrow's marketplace.”

Cuts will be among the necessary changes, she said.




https://www.govexec.com/management/2015/02/new-postal-leader-takes-charge-obama-calls-major-usps-reforms/104394/

[Legion]

Mar 20, 2009


Postal service to slash more than 3,000 jobs, offer early retirements



The U.S. Postal Service will be cutting more than 3,000 jobs and offering nearly a quarter of its work force early retirement as part of its efforts to streamline operations amid the worsening economy, the agency said Friday.



https://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/03/20/post.office.cuts/index.html

[Legion]

Mar 22, 2012


Workers face loss of more than 100,000 jobs as Obama joins attack on postal service


The US Postal Service, claiming that it faces annual losses that will mount to $18.2 billion by 2015, has announced that it will go ahead with the elimination of up to 264 mail processing centers around the country, reducing the postal workforce by up to 155,000 jobs, on top of the 130,000 jobs that have been cut over the past three years.

President Barack Obama’s budget for the 2013 fiscal year calls for the destruction of tens of thousands of postal positions, as well as the elimination of Saturday mail delivery as early as January 2013.

Other attacks on the immediate agenda are the end or the weakening of the overnight delivery guarantee for first class mail, and the closure of up to 3,700 post offices around the country, devastating many neighborhoods as well as small towns and rural areas where the poor and elderly are particularly dependent upon their local post office.




https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/03/post-m22.html

[Legion]

May 11, 2016


Cuts By Postal Service To Slow Mail

The United States Postal Service announced planned changes to its delivery standards.

First class mail will move more slowly as a result of the cash-strapped agency's decision to close hundreds of mail sorting centers, including one in Springfield Massachusetts..

The US Postal Service, which has seen first class mail volume fall 25 percent since 2007, will make changes by spring that will all but eliminate next day delivery of stamped correspondence.

The reduced delivery standard is a result of the decision to close half the roughly 500 mail sorting centers in the country. The cuts will save 3 billion dollars, according to Christine Dugas, the spokesperson for the Connecticut Valley District of the US Postal Service.

Current standards call for delivering first class mail in one to three days. Over 42 percent of first class mail is delivered the day after it is sent.

But when roughly 250 processing centers close, the distance the mail travels between post offices will increase, so more than half of first class mail will have a two day delivery expectation, and most of the rest three days.

A sample of customers at the main post office in Springfield Massachusetts brought a mixed reaction to the service cutbacks.

The postal service announced in September it was looking into closing processing centers.

Michael Harazmus, president of branch 46 of the National Association of Letter Carriers, says cutting service is no way to build a business.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says he has a game plan to cut the postal service's annual expenses by 20 billion dollars by 2015.

It includes closing 3,700 local post offices and cutting mail delivery from six days a week to five.


https://www.wamc.org/post/cuts-postal-service-slow-mail

[Charoite]

Anyone that gets packages on a somewhat regular basis knows exactly when this shit went down. Even my Amazon Prime shipments are getting fucked up. Do I think Trump would sabotage the post office just to be able to say he was right? He already gutted the EPA and other government entities, so it is something he does. Being able to claim he was right would be icing on the cake.

[Legion]

March 13, 2014


White House Budget Proposes Damaging Postal Service Cuts


President Obama’s budget would allow USPS to scrap all Saturday delivery—even packages, one of the most rapidly growing parts of the Postal Service’s business. USPS in recent months has shown more interest in expanding when it delivers packages, with Sunday delivery now in limited areas.

The White House budget would also allow USPS to move away from door-to-door delivery to more centralized delivery areas, an idea also panned by Democrats. Plus, USPS could keep a recent temporary increase in the price of stamps—which large mailers loathe—beyond the scheduled two years.

According to the Obama administration, these reforms—along with a proposal to tinker with some of the immediate requirements for pre-funding retiree healthcare benefits seventy-five years into the future—“would set USPS on a sustainable business path, providing it with over $20 billion in cash relief, operational savings and revenue through 2016.”

But that’s not how the people who deliver the mail, and who have battled to preserve the postal service, see it.

American Postal Workers Union president Mark Dimondstein says the administration budget echoes “misguided policies…for severe cutbacks that will harm service, drive away business, and eliminate jobs.”

“The budget fails to eliminate the pre-funding requirement of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which is the fundamental cause of the Postal Service’s manufactured financial crisis,” says Dimondstein, who adds that “with the Postal Service posting operating profits in mail and package delivery, there is absolutely no justification to continue a strategy of austerity. Rather than damaging the infrastructure and network that is essential for providing service, the Postal Service must expand service.”

That’s a message that a new alliance of postal unions—the APWU, the National Association of Letter Carriers, the National Postal Mail Handlers Union and the National Rural Letter Carriers Association—wants to communicate to the president and his budget team.

The unions offered this week to meet with the White House to discuss strategies for strengthening the postal service.

But the first reform has to involve a realistic restructuring of that requirement to prefund retiree health benefits decades into the future.

“Our Postal Service is in need of true reform, not ill‐advised, counter‐productive attempts to slash service,” says National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association president Jeanette Dwyer.

“By reworking the Postal Service’s funding of its retiree health benefits, an obligation which accounts for 80 percent of USPS losses over recent years and is forced on no other public or private entity, lawmakers could take the easiest and most sensible step toward getting this venerable institution back on the right page. Allowing the Postal Service to continue to innovate with same‐day parcel delivery and other services will provide a great opportunity to generate needed revenue and allow the USPS to remain a competitive player in the shipping and delivery industry. We need to grow our Postal Service not shrink it.”

Instead of borrowing ideas from members of Congress who want to downsize and dismantle the postal service, White House aides would be well to take the counsel of members who recognize the immense potential of the postal service.



https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/misdirected-mail-white-house-budget-proposes-damaging-postal-service-cuts/

[Trump's Brain]

DEMOCRATS ARE BOUGHT & PAID FOR BY GOVERNMENT UNIONS

PUBLISHED: February 15, 2013 at 4:01 a.m. | UPDATED: August 12, 2016


All but five of Congress’s 255 DEMOCRATS and independents received campaign donations from postal worker union groups in the past six years, raising the political risk of Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe’s move to end Saturday mail delivery.

Political action committees for the seven postal unions contributed $9.6 million from 2007 to 2012 to current members of Congress, 91 percent of it to DEMOCRATS and two independents who caucus with them, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.

DEMOCRATS control the U.S. Senate, which must agree to most of the changes Donahoe says are needed to save the Postal Service from insolvency. Many of his proposals are intended to reduce labor costs accounting for 80 percent of the service’s expenses.

That puts Donahoe in conflict with post office unions, which would lose most of the estimated 22,500 jobs that would be cut if Saturday delivery ends, and have spent years making friends on Capitol Hill.

“That’s why it’s been so hard to come up with a plan for the Postal Service,” said Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based watchdog group. “The obvious thing you want to do is cut back on the number of employees, cut back on services, cut back on benefits. That’s something DEMOCRATS haven’t wanted to do because of the support they’ve gotten from the unions.”

Donahoe is trying to cut $20 billion a year in costs after the Postal Service, in the face of declining mail volume due in part to e-mail and online commerce, lost $15.9 billion last fiscal year and an additional $1.3 billion in the quarter that ended Dec. 31.

The postmaster general stood by his position that ending Saturday mail delivery in August is legal, even though appropriations bills for three decades have required six-day mail, with the government operating under temporary funding.

Senate DEMOCRATS including Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada insist they, not Donahoe, get to decide on ending Saturday delivery.

The Senate passed a measure last year that gave Donahoe some of what he wanted, while blocking him from ending Saturday mail delivery for at least two years. The House didn’t vote on that measure or its own plan.

“It may be in the public interest to curtail Saturday mail delivery, but the decision may not be made in economic interests but in the interest of who their friends are,” said Gary Chaison, a labor professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

Every elected member of the Senate DEMOCRAT caucus has received contributions from postal union political committees, the records show. Of the 55 Senate Democrats, only Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Mo Cowan of Massachusetts, who were appointed, haven’t received donations from at least one postal union PAC. By comparison, 19 of the Senate’s 45 Republican got postal contributions.

Stephen Lynch, a DEMOCRAT House member from Massachusetts running in the special election to fill new Secretary of State John Kerry’s Senate seat, received the most among House members in the past six years. Lynch, whose mother was a postal clerk and father was an ironworker, received $175,100 from postal PACs, the records show.

A campaign spokesman, Conor Yunits, said the lawmaker has always been close to postal and ironworkers unions because of his parents. “He’s very proud to have that support and these organizations have always been very important to his family,” Yunits said.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., received $96,500 in contributions to lead all senators, though his figures also include donations to his House campaigns in 2008 and 2010.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a co-sponsor last year of the legislation that would have required waiting at least two years to end Saturday mail delivery, received $70,500, more postal union donations than any Republican in Congress. Calls to Collins’s office over two days weren’t returned.

In the House, 197 out of 200 DEMOCRATS received postal union PAC donations.

The biggest postal-union donor was the National Association of Letter Carriers, which trailed only the American Federation of Teachers among union political committees in campaign giving for the 2012 elections.

DEMOCRATS say they’re concerned about the impact of postal service changes on employees.

Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top DEMOCRAT on Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said 45 percent of Postal Service employees are minorities, 40 percent are women and 21 percent are veterans. Some might not be able to find other work if they lose their jobs, he said.

“Our main concern is compassion for those who have given their blood, sweat and tears to make our mail system work,” Cummings said.

Union officials including Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, say most proposed cuts aren’t necessary because the Postal Service’s financial woes stem from its legal requirement to prepay costs of future retirees’ health benefits.

The service has defaulted on those payments for the past two years, $11.1 billion in all, and last week said it won’t be able to afford this year’s payment.

“It’s clear that eliminating Saturday delivery would hurts tens of millions of Americans and countless small businesses while not addressing the financial problems,” Rolando said in an e-mailed statement.

Donahoe has asked Congress to restructure or end that requirement, while seeking to close hundreds of post offices and mail-handling plants and to pull postal workers out of the U.S. government employees’ health plan.

Lawmakers opposing cuts say they’re voicing constituents’ sentiments.

Jon Tester of Montana, who received $65,000 in postal union donations, fourth most among Senate DEMOCRATS, on Wednesday called the Postal Service “absolutely critical” to the rural areas he represents.

Postal workers, of which there are 521,000, are among those constituents.

The Postal Service’s work force is larger than that of any publicly traded U.S.-based company other than Wal-Mart Stores.

Jeanette Dwyer, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, said the contributions help the union motivate its members to lobby their representatives. “It’s a grassroots tool,” she said.

The postal unions are also mobilizing allies including MoveOn.org, which started a petition drive demanding Congress prevent closings of small-town post offices.

“The union money is less important than the fact that there are union members everywhere,” said Art Sackler, coordinator of the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, whose members include Bank of America and eBay and which supports cutting postal costs. “And there are relatives of union members everywhere. And they all care.”

Still, Issa said, cutbacks are inevitable.

“We’re going to ultimately all get to a numerically smaller Postal Service,” he said.



https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/02/15/postal-union-donations-to-democrats-complicate-service-cuts/

Unions are the only thing standing between blue collar workers' benefits and Republicans.

[Legion]

Anyone that gets packages on a somewhat regular basis knows exactly when this shit went down. Even my Amazon Prime shipments are getting fucked up. Do I think Trump would sabotage the post office just to be able to say he was right? He already gutted the EPA and other government entities, so it is something he does. Being able to claim he was right would be icing on the cake.