Yeah, it is definitely one of the most tortured organizations I know of. Congress as usual wants a ton of conflicting things:

1. Mandate universal delivery of letters regardless of distance or remoteness, even out in some wilderness region of Alaska, guarantee everyone the right to get a letter for the same stamp price as to deliver a letter from one office in the Chrysler Building to another one.

2. Have USPS not get taxpayer funds for anything

3. Impose arbitrary price controls on postage based on Congressional vibes

4. Have postal employees still be federal employees and qualify for cushy benefits and retirement (I assume this is there because their unions would strike if it was taken away)

5. Micromanage how that retirement plan is funded

6. Give USPS special privileges like the one being discussed... or like the basic monopoly on 'delivering non-urgent letters' that bars UPS from delivering mail into your mailbox.

If all the above sound extremely confused, that's because the USPS has been the object of political meddling for at least 5-6 decades, so it still shows the fingerprints of many ideologically-conflicting schemes and agendas all at once.

Don't forget, pre-fund pension accounts for future 'yet-to-be-hired' employees.

Wasn't that requirement finally repealed recently?

Oh, wow. Apparently it was! https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/what-did-po...

Don’t forget about their needs to fund retirement for 75 years.

> I assume this is there because their unions would strike

If postal employees are federal GS employees, they are not legally allowed to strike:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

Exactly. Therefore "Have postal employees still be federal employees [...] because their unions would strike [...]" can be translated to "If we allow them to strike (by them not being federal employees), then they will strike".

Why shouldn’t they be federal employees?

I mean, I don't care what they are personally. But with making the USPS self-sufficient and not requiring infusions from the taxpayer being a goal that has been pursued and achieved, you could construct a world where the USPS simply IPOs, or its ownership tranferred to a weighted consortium of all 50 states or something, and a change in ownership like that would render those postal employees not federal employees anymore. So it was more that "keeping them federal employees" places some constraints on what we can do with USPS.

> Postal operations are instead funded by sales to you, the postal customer. Now it depends almost entirely on sales to keep the lights on.

If you ever wonder why you get so much postal spam, this is why. The USPS is mostly funded by advertising. They could, for instance, stop the practice of accepting "deliver this junk to every mailbox in this region"...but then they'd go bankrupt.

Bipartisan effort concentrated across many years to destroy one of the most useful services in the nation.

It is not for the USPS to decide which mail gets delivered or not. They get paid to deliver mail, and they deliver it. This is a wild take on “the postal service should now do anti-spam”.

It is absolutely the job of the USPS to be a public service. Many countries' postal services have the concept of letting individual recipients opt out of bulk mail; for instance, in the Netherlands, you can put a "NEE" sticker on your mailbox. Or, better yet, entirely discontinue the specifically designed bulk mail programs that exist to deliver postal spam.

I'm not suggesting the USPS should be filtering by content, just taking the programs that exist specifically to facilitate postal spam and consigning them to the dustbin of history. Those programs essentially exist because they're a primary funding source for USPS.