The United States Postal Service has warned that it will “run out of cash” by the fall without intervention—and Donald Trump appears unwilling to help. According to the Washington Post, the president vowed to veto the $2 trillion rescue package Congress passed last month if it contained any bailout money for this crucial independent agency, which has been under additional strain due to the coronavirus crisis. He has instead called for USPS to “raise the prices” on companies like Amazon. “They ought to do that, and we are looking into it,” the president said Wednesday. “We’ve been pushing them now for over a year.”

Trump has frequently attacked USPS, roping the agency into his long-running blood feud with Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who also owns another Trump target: the Washington Post. Trump has said the company costs the postal service “massive amounts of money for being their Delivery Boy,” calling for USPS to raise their prices—something experts and the USPS Board of Governors have recommended against. Already on unstable financial footing, the postal service had the rug pulled out from underneath it by the COVID pandemic. “The Postal Service was technically insolvent to begin with, but the pandemic has completely changed the environment here,” Democratic Representative Gerry Connolly, whose oversight subcommittee oversees the agency, told CNN. “The mail volume drop is catastrophic.” The service has asked for $75 billion to stay afloat, but the White House has rejected pleas for help.

“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the postal service] was in it,” a Trump administration official told the Post, referring to the historic coronavirus rescue legislation enacted in March. “I don’t know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.”

Lawmakers attempted to secure some help for the embattled agency, adding a $13 billion grant to the sweeping legislation. But Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin shot them down. “You can have a loan, or you can have nothing at all,” Mnuchin said, per the Post. Senators Gary Peters and Ron Johnson eventually got a $10 billion loan added, which could buy the agency a few more months. But even that isn’t a sure thing, currently awaiting approval from the Treasury department, overseen by a secretary who had objected to the loan’s inclusion in the bill. “I’m so frustrated at how difficult it has been for a long time to galvanize attention and action around an essential service,” Connolly told the Post.

For some Americans, the pandemic has laid bare the importance of this often unsung agency. While the deadly coronavirus has forced many Americans to shelter in their homes, postal employees have kept working, continuing mail delivery uninterrupted at personal risk; hundreds of USPS workers have already tested positive for COVID, and several have died. The first USPS worker to die from the virus was a Detroit man and Army veteran who had worked for the agency for three decades. “He was a proud mail handler,” the Postal Mail Handlers Union said April 1.

For Trump, though, the pandemic has seemed an opportunity for him to settle scores with the agency—and as leverage in his longstanding feuds with Bezos and American democracy. Indeed, his apparent plan to bleed the postal service dry comes as the agency is poised to play perhaps a bigger role than ever in November’s election, as Democrats and voting rights advocates call for mail-in voting and other measures to ensure Americans can safely cast ballots in the midst of the pandemic. Trump and his allies have resisted, arguing—with stunning candor—that the higher voter turnout that could result would be disastrous for Republicans electorally. “I think mail-in voting is horrible,” Trump said last week, despite having cast a ballot by mail in Florida’s election weeks earlier. Rulings that allowed Wisconsin’s in-person election to proceed as scheduled last week showed that the courts could back Trump’s assaults on Americans’ constitutional rights; pulling the plug on the postal service, which would be likely essential to remote voting, could be another way of ensuring that such measures don’t go forward.

“The Post Office survived 245 years, a revolution, an empire striking back, a civil war, a world war, a depression, a 2nd world war, a cold war and all the rest,” Walter Schaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, wrote Sunday. “If it dies now, it’ll be one more piece of America destroyed by Trump—likely because he’s afraid of mail-in voting.”

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