Treasury agrees to lend Postal Service $10 billion in trade for rivals' shipping contracts

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21. Is the Postal Service Being Manipulated to Help Trump Get Reelected?

Daily Comment

Is the Postal Service Being Manipulated to Help Trump Get Reëlected?

By Steve Coll
July 29, 2020

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The Trump Presidency has tested the resiliency of many of the country’s democratic institutions: the courts, the press, the military, the civil service. It is a testament to how thoroughly Trump’s norm-shattering, autocratic leadership has permeated Washington that even the sleepy Post Office has become politicized and thrust into a position where its capacity for independence and professionalism is being tested, and will help determine the story of the United States’ most consequential election in generations.

For most of American history, the Postal Service was a direct arm of Presidential power and political-party patronage; it was only severed from the executive branch, to be funded by its own revenues, half a century ago. A goal of that restructuring was to “get rid of the patronage, the cronyism, and the corruption that may have existed in the old Post Office,” Dimondstein, the union president, told me. “We are concerned that this Administration is going back to that type of past.”

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Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. His latest book is “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”