It’s Illinois, so there are a lot of politics in play that aren’t usually an issue in most of the US. If someone in charge of my post office snubbed the wrong person at a work event, it wouldn’t be surprising if the snub-ee did things like moving money around to stop an order of new mail trucks from being deployed to our routes. (That’s not a democrat or republican thing, it’s an Illinois political machine thing.)

However, bigger political issues come into play, too. When DeJoy first took over, people in parts of my House district weren’t getting mail at all. He was removing mail sorting machines from post offices, for cryin’ out loud. Apartment buildings had package dumps that the residents had to comb through to hopefully find their stuff, if it hadn’t been stolen. Letters and packages were getting delayed or lost and being reported as delivered. (I’ve had at least one package get reported as delivered that showed up in my mailbox a week later, but a two-day delay between report and delivery is much more common.) People getting government checks and medication in the mail were left waiting for things that might or might not show up, no indicators of where they were, and nobody to ask for a status update. Just “item delivered at mailbox/front door” and nothing.

Ten years ago, it was $0.49 to mail a first class letter that would be delivered, pretty reliably, in about three days. Now that services have been “brought more into line with existing services” like FedEx and UPS, it’s $0.78 and shows up whenever.