A new inspector general report indicates that officials knew that the industrial park had been targeted in the past.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, a footnote mentioned that “Postal Service officials at the MDC were aware of general security related issues occurring as recently as four years ago in the same industrial park, which resulted in the loss of thousands of dollars’ worth of tools and equipment suffered by prior tenants.” Nonetheless, “despite several security-related incidents, MDC officials did not view” the facility “as an at-risk, administrative facility that necessitated urgent mitigating actions.”
The USPS has struggled in recent years. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it experienced consistent declines in revenue even as it sat on tens of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities. The USPS delivery system is optimized for paper mail over packages, even though the advent of e-commerce means that more people are ordering packages and fewer are sending and receiving letters. Given such a long record of subpar performance, it should come as no surprise that the USPS failed to do so much as even install a security camera to protect its own assets.
