The Postal Service’s future hinges on the last mile. That was the central message delivered by Postmaster General David Steiner in his Nov. 14, 2025, remarks to the USPS Board of Governors: modernize operations, expand services, and leverage USPS’s unparalleled reach to every home and business in America.
He’s right. The Postal Service’s last-mile network is its greatest competitive advantage. But it only works if the public trusts it — and right now, that trust is evaporating.
Across the country, police departments are warning residents not to use blue collection boxes. Letter carriers are being robbed in broad daylight. Stolen arrow keys — the master keys that open neighborhood cluster boxes and apartment panels — have become a nationwide criminal currency.
Oh, bravo, — another impassioned plea from the Postal Police Officers Association to resurrect the Postal Police as if that’s the magic bullet for the Postal Service’s self-inflicted apocalypse. The Postal Service isn’t just failing the “last mile”; it’s a full-on marathon of monumental stupidity from top to bottom.
Of course, the USPS should be using the Postal Police Officers it already pays for— trained, and ready to roll — to stomp out this postal crime wave before it turns every mailbox into a criminal’s playground. But no, they’re too stupid to deploy the one tool in their arsenal that’s purpose-built for the job, preferring instead to let carriers fend for themselves while the brass hides behind bureaucratic excuses.
Sidelining your PPOs in 2020 during a crime wave — Genius move. Right as crime syndicates turned blue boxes into their personal ATMs and arrow keys into dark web gold. Who needs uniformed police when you can let carriers get mugged in broad daylight and then pat yourselves on the back for “investigating” from the safety of a desk?
But hey, that’s just the tip of the idiocy iceberg. We’ve got billions in losses piling up faster than undelivered packages, service performance cratering like a black hole, and network “modernization” that’s about as effective as a screen door on a submarine.
If the Postal Service’s leadership is too dense to grasp that police officers—you know, the ones they already pay for—actually prevent crime, then how on earth could these geniuses ever unravel a system that’s rotten to its bloated core: engineered for epic failure, lavishly rewarded for dysfunction, and too smugly arrogant to own up to its own incompetence?
Face it, USPS: You’re not a “national asset”—you’re a masterclass in bureaucratic buffoonery, a farce stumbling toward irrelevance.
The morale of the agency in the pits because they put the beast of burden in carriers. My office has daily “you suck meetings” about productivity goals. The Post Office has lofty expectations for carriers for such a low salary. Carriers are now required to falsify scans and clear out their scanners each night.
This is a scathing critique of USPS operations that makes several pointed observations:
The core argument is valid: The piece correctly identifies that trust is fundamental to last-mile delivery. If people won’t use blue mailboxes or feel unsafe mailing checks, the network’s reach becomes irrelevant. The author cites real security concerns—carrier robberies, stolen arrow keys, and police warnings against using collection boxes.
The frustration seems genuine: The anger about sidelined Postal Police Officers during a crime surge (2020) speaks to a real operational paradox—having trained security personnel on payroll but not deploying them effectively while carriers face increasing violence.
The blue mailbox is a trap.
We are officially warned not to use it. The trust that the postal system runs on is gone, stolen along with the checks and the arrow keys.
This isn’t a logistics problem. It’s a security failure. Carriers are being robbed on their routes, while a specialized police force meant to protect them—the Postal Police—is sidelined. We’re paying for a security team that’s been benched during the biggest crime wave in the service’s history.
A delivery network that people are afraid to use is a failed network. It doesn’t matter how far it reaches if the last step is into a thief’s hands.
Deploy the cops. Secure the mail. Restore the trust. Everything else is just talk.
USPIS has become disgraceful. Thank god i retired.