In December 2006 a postal bill sat on the President’s desk, and most of it was the kind of housekeeping nobody reads. Rate rules. An oversight commission with a new name. Ninety pages of it.
Buried in there was one provision that didn’t belong with the rest. The Postal Service would have to start setting aside billions of dollars a year, every year, against the health benefits of people who would retire decades later. Some not hired yet. A few not born yet. No other agency had to do this. Almost no private company does it either.
Here’s the part that matters. The congressman who wrote the bill, Tom Davis, has said in the years since exactly why that provision was in there, and it had nothing to do with the mail. The White House had threatened to veto the whole bill without it, because the money the Postal Service was forced to park made the federal government’s budget math look better that year. It was an accounting favor. Davis has also said, for the record, that wrecking the Postal Service was never the point. I believe him. That’s what makes it worse.
Bush signed it on December 20, 2006. Within a few years the Postal Service was “losing money.” Within a decade the losses were the entire argument: it can’t even run the mail, why is the government doing this at all. The losses were real. By the Postal Service’s own inspector general, about $54 billion of roughly $62 billion in red ink over the next ten years was that one provision. Not the mail. The provision.
So nobody had to want the Post Office dead. They just needed its money to make a number look good for a year, and they were fine letting it break as a side effect. Then, for fifteen years, the side effect got read aloud as the verdict.
Twenty-one parts in, the picture doesn’t change. This is the part where they pull the money out of the thing you already own, wait for it to break the way starving anything breaks it, and then hold up the break and tell you government can’t do anything right.
The Backlog Is The Part You’re Allowed To Be Angry About
The loud fight is the broken service. The hold music. The line at the counter that doesn’t move. The agency everyone has a horror story about. That fight is real, and it is almost never where the decision got made. What you’re shown is the symptom. The argument about the symptom, run loud, for years, while nobody looks at the cause, isn’t the system failing. It’s one of the ways the system keeps running the play.
So the whole post is a contrast, and it holds all the way through. There is the failure you’re handed to be angry about, and there is the thing that built it: a slow, deliberate, decades-long starving of the institutions the public actually owns, plus the people standing there ready to collect when the starved thing finally gets called broken and sold off. The first is loud and on television. The second is quiet and on the record, if you go look.
The last post was this exact machine running the other way: public money shoved in, toward the private firm, to rescue it and stand behind it for free. This is the same hand, held back from the public thing on purpose.
Before the four examples, a few honest things, because the argument doesn’t survive without them. Not every public service works. Some are genuinely badly run. An agency with no competition can get slow and pleased with itself, and that’s a real problem nobody had to invent. Not every budget cut is sabotage. Some reforms sold as efficiency were honest tries, and some of those failed on their own. You can hold all of that and still see the pattern, because the pattern is the part that repeats.
And mostly the pattern is a consensus, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. “Starve the beast” isn’t a phrase one party came up with last year. It traces to a Reagan budget director in the 1980s, who described the move plainly: cut the money so the thing fails, then point at the failure. After that it ran through both parties. The 2006 postal law passed with broad bipartisan support and a Republican signed it. The machinery that makes a public thing miserable to use was built by administrations of both kinds. There is no clean villain here, and inventing one would be its own kind of lie.
One stretch is not symmetric, though, and pretending it is would be the opposite lie. In 2025 the cutting stopped being a doctrine and turned into a demolition. The tax agency lost roughly a quarter of its people in a single year, including about a third of the agents who run the hardest audits. The Social Security Administration took the biggest staffing cut in its history and then stopped publishing the numbers that showed what the cut did. Congress clawed back most of what was left of the money it had voted that tax agency three years earlier, the largest single cut to its base on record. A separate bill cancelled the funding for a public broadcasting system that had run since 1967, which then announced it would shut down, passed two hundred sixteen to two hundred thirteen in the House and fifty-one to forty-eight in the Senate, almost no votes from the other side. The doctrine is bipartisan and forty years deep. The 2025 acceleration is not. You have to say both and let neither cover for the other.
One more thing belongs here, because it’s why the quiet part stays quiet. There is real money in the verdict itself. The same interests that do well when a public service gets handed to a company also bankroll the institutes that publish the studies and the ads that say government can’t run anything. So by the time “it doesn’t work” reaches you, it doesn’t sound like a sales pitch. It sounds like something everybody already knows. That isn’t an accident. That’s a line item.
Four Ways They Break It, From The One With A Cover Story To The One That Says It Out Loud
The cleanest way to see this is to watch how much of a disguise the sabotage bothers to put on. The first one wears a full costume, where the breaking is dressed up as something responsible. The next two wear less. The last one stopped pretending decades ago and just says it into a microphone. They get more honest about what they’re doing as you go down the list, and the most honest one is the one nobody treats as news.
The first is the postal mandate from the top of this post, and the cover story was accounting. The Postal Service got handed a cost no other agency carries, started defaulting on it in 2012 because it couldn’t pay and run the mail at the same time, and the “losses” became a permanent talking point. Nobody stood up and said they were destroying it. They said budget score. The tell is what happened when the cover story finally got pulled off. In 2022 Congress repealed the prefunding mandate. The thing everyone agreed was the problem, gone. And the Postal Service kept getting broken anyway. A modernization plan slowed delivery, especially in rural areas. Stamp prices went up six times. The agency lost around $9.5 billion in one recent year and is tracking billions more in the next. The postmaster general who ran the slowdown got pushed out in 2025 in a fight with the administration’s own cost-cutting operation, and the man brought in to replace him came off the board of FedEx. And the talk turned openly to privatizing the Postal Service or folding it into the Commerce Department. So the statute was only the first instrument. Take it away and the breaking continues by other means, and the talk of selling the thing gets louder, not quieter. Whether a private company would deliver to the end of a dirt road for the price of a stamp is its own argument, and it belongs to a later post, not this one. The only claim here is narrower: the failure was arranged, and the verdict was written before it happened.
The second is Social Security in 2025, and the cover story was efficiency, which is a thinner costume because it rips so easily. The agency walked into the year already short-staffed, down about ten thousand people since 2010 while serving more people every year. Then came the biggest staffing cut in its history: roughly seven thousand more pushed out toward a headcount target somebody picked, ten regional offices folded into four, the support behind the front line gutted, headquarters cut roughly in half. What came next wasn’t a mystery. Backlogs hit records, millions of cases pending in the processing centers, millions more transactions stacked up in field offices. More than half of retirees waited over a month just for an appointment to apply. Calls to the national line waited over an hour, and at the worst, hours. And here’s the part that gives it away. That summer, with the bad numbers piling up, the agency quietly stopped releasing the key ones: how long you wait on the phone, how long for an appointment, how big the backlog is. Some came back later. The ones that mattered didn’t. You don’t switch off the scoreboard for a game you’re winning. The wait stayed. The proof of the wait disappeared. What’s left for the public is a hold tone and a conclusion: this doesn’t work. That conclusion isn’t a side effect of the cut. It’s the product.
The third is veterans’ health care, and the cover story is the kindest-sounding one of all: choice. The Veterans Health Administration is the largest health system in the country, around nine million patients, and its problems have been about capacity for a decade, meaning not enough staff for the demand. The fix for that is staff. What’s happening instead is the opposite. The system is in the middle of cutting on the order of thirty thousand jobs, close to one in twelve. And the budget sent up for the next year routes roughly three-quarters of the new medical-care money away from the VA’s own hospitals and toward private providers, the biggest outsourcing jump yet. Now follow the loop, because it’s the whole reason this example is here. Cut the staff. Capacity drops. Wait times go up, predictably, on schedule. The long waits become the argument that veterans need to be sent outside for care. The money follows them out. Which leaves the VA’s own system with less, so it cuts again. A panel of the VA’s own experts described this exact cycle, and it is now the operating model. The dollars that walk out the door don’t vanish. They land with the companies that run the private networks and the contractors who coordinate the referrals. This is the one example where you can see who’s holding the receipt. The disguise here is the thinnest yet. It isn’t “we’re being responsible,” it’s “we’re giving you a choice,” and underneath it is the same move with an invoice attached.
The fourth one wears no costume, which is exactly why it works. It’s the doctrine itself, said out loud, for forty years. Grover Norquist, who built a tax-pledge operation in the 1980s that has most of one party bound to never raise a dime of revenue, put the goal in a 2001 interview about as plainly as a person can. He didn’t want to abolish government, he said. He wanted to shrink it down to where he could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. That’s not a leaked memo. That’s the plan, on the radio, on purpose. And it has one clean worked example this series already covered, so it gets a single sentence and no more: the tax agency was starved for years, it predictably got worse at answering the phone and auditing the rich, and the getting-worse became the case for starving it again, the same template, the tax part left alone here because that ground’s already been walked. The point of this last one isn’t a new name to be mad at. It’s that there’s no hidden conspiracy to dig up, because nobody hid it. It’s a stated program with a forty-year paper trail. Calling it a conspiracy is the thing that keeps it safe, because conspiracies sound unserious, and meanwhile the people running it are quoting themselves.
What’s Real
A few honest qualifications, because the strongest version of this is the one that doesn’t pretend the other side has nothing.
Some public services really are run badly, and not because anyone drew up a plan. A big agency with no competitor can let a bad process live for thirty years because nothing forces the issue. That’s true. It’s an argument for fixing the process, not for starving the agency until it collapses, but it’s true, and a person can believe it and not be a stooge.
Not every cut is sabotage, and not every move toward private is theft. Community care for veterans exists for a real reason: a vet in a rural county three hours from a VA hospital should be able to see a doctor in town, and a lot of people of good faith built that on purpose. The honest disagreement isn’t whether that should exist. It’s what happens when the in-house system gets starved at the same time the outside option gets fed. Whether private actually does it better or worse, and where, is a real argument with evidence on both sides, and it’s the next-but-one post in this series, not this one. This post isn’t making that case. It’s making the narrower one: the failure was engineered, and the verdict was written first.
Take the man who wrote the postal law at his word, too. Davis says destroying the Postal Service wasn’t the goal, and the fair reading is that he’s telling the truth. The budget trick was the motive and the wreckage was the part nobody cared enough to stop. Fine. The wreckage was still predictable, was predicted, and got used as the argument for fifteen years anyway. Intent was never the claim. The pattern is.
And the agencies do sometimes climb back. Under enough pressure and a pile of overtime, Social Security clawed part of the backlog down later in the year, a real improvement, worth saying plainly. The point isn’t that nothing was ever recovered. It’s that the hole was dug on purpose, and the climbing back out cost exactly the kind of resources the cut took away.
One last honest note, on a number you’ll see thrown around. People say the Postal Service was forced to fund seventy-five years of benefits for workers who weren’t born. The Government Accountability Office has pushed back on that framing; it was a long funding schedule, not literally seventy-five years stuffed into ten. The popular version oversells it. Strip the embellishment and the real thing still stands: a multibillion-dollar yearly cost nothing else in government carries, dropped in for a reason that had nothing to do with the mail. You don’t need the exaggeration. The plain facts are bad enough.
What They’re Paying For
So set what this actually produces against the fight you’re handed about the backlog. It’s four things stacked together, and each one has a beneficiary you can name, which is the difference between this and yelling about “the government.”
It is a public institution broken by an instrument that was never about the institution. The beneficiary isn’t abstract. It’s the budget that got to look balanced for a year, and everyone who spent the next fifteen using the wreckage as the standing case for selling it.
And it is a service made miserable to use on purpose, then made impossible to measure so the misery couldn’t be proven. The beneficiary is whoever needed the public thing to look hopeless and got, instead of an argument they’d have to win, a hold tone and a number that quietly went missing.
And it is a loop with an invoice: starve the in-house system, watch the wait grow, send the work outside, repeat. The beneficiary is the private network and the referral contractor that collect on every patient walked out the door, while the public system they walked away from gets a little smaller each year.
And it is a doctrine said out loud for forty years and treated like weather instead of a plan. The beneficiary is everyone who needed “government can’t do anything” to sound like a fact, including the political actors who took the donations, voted for the starving, and then held up the result as proof. That is the bill the fight about the backlog has been keeping you from reading.
The Fixes Are Boring
The fixes are structural, not slogans, and a couple of the popular ones are traps wearing a fix’s clothes. “Just fund it” isn’t on the list, because a one-time check with nothing stopping next year’s defunding is exactly how this works: the money goes in, the money quietly comes back out, and you’re told it was tried. “Abolish it, the private sector will handle it” isn’t on the list either, because that’s not a fix, that’s the sabotage finishing its own job, the populist version of the same con. Several of these are things the country actually did and then undid. Roughly cheapest and most immediate to genuinely hard:
- Stop letting an agency’s own money get used as a budget prop. The postal mandate existed to make a federal number look better, not to fund anything. Bar the move. The watered-down version is on the record: the 2022 repeal fixed that one instance and changed nothing about the next one.
- Put public-service budgets on automatic inflation escalators, so a cut takes a vote. If a service has to be cut, make someone vote to cut it, on the record, instead of letting it bleed out by holding the number flat while costs rise. The diluted version is the status quo: the cut already happens by doing nothing, which is precisely why it’s done that way.
- Require agencies to keep publishing their service metrics, with no discretion to stop. Wait times, backlogs, answer rates, published on a fixed schedule, by law. The toothless version is what just happened: Social Security stopped releasing the worst numbers the month they got bad, and nothing was there to stop it.
- Restore the gutted staffing and ring-fence it from the next clawback. Fund the people, and make the money unrescindable so it can’t be voted in and quietly pulled back out. The watered-down version already ran: the tax agency’s rebuild money was voted, then roughly two-thirds of it was clawed back.
- Close the revolving door between an agency and the contractors that profit when it’s degraded. The person running the public thing shouldn’t have just come from, or be heading to, the company that collects when it’s outsourced. The diluted version is the norm: cooling-off rules exist and are full of holes, and the ex-industry executive running the agency is a recurring feature, not a fluke.
- When a degraded service gets outsourced, force the comparison against the service funded, not the service after the starving. The pitch is always the broken version against the private one. Require the honest baseline. The rigged version is the only one anyone ever runs, which is the entire trick.
- Make privatizing a core public service require a standalone vote, not a rider, and yes, this is the hard one. If a public thing is going to be handed off, make it happen in the open, on its own, with its own vote, not buried in a budget bill at two in the morning. It’s last because it’s genuinely hard and the people who benefit will fight it hardest. Saying that plainly is better than pretending the list is all easy.
Six of those seven are a statute, an appropriation, or an enforcement choice, things a Congress or an administration could do without inventing anything new, several of them just by undoing a loosening from the last few years. The seventh is the genuinely hard one, and it’s more honest to say so than to pretend otherwise. None of them is the radical position. The radical position, measured against the simple idea that a thing you pay for should work, is the one we’re already living in: starve it, wait for the break, hold up the break, sell what’s left.
Who Is This For
Twenty-one parts in, you’ve now watched the same move run twice from opposite directions, money shoved in and money held back, with the same hands on both. The public thing gets broken on purpose, and the wreckage gets read back to you as the verdict. Which leaves one obvious question: why is the verdict the only part you ever actually hear? That’s the next post. Part 22 is media consolidation, where a handful of companies own most of what tells you how government is doing, and they are not strangers to the companies that do well when government gets called hopeless. Different layer. Same question.
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