![Go[ing] Postal](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lRzt!,w_80,h_80,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9e03b0b6-2100-4e6e-b2d7-7c6c009ef6c4_1280x1280.png)
No matter the party in power, one thing is always true: bureaucrats will set their sights on successful and innovative businesses. After Google survived overzealous antitrust enforcers trying to break it up, the government is again targeting the company—this time over bogus charges of discrimination against Republicans. It’s bizarre that antitrust authorities are spending so much time and taxpayer dollars going after companies that are clearly not monopolies, as admitted by the judges presiding over their cases. Stranger still, the government is empowering actual monopolies like the U.S. Postal Service to enforce antitrust law.
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division recently announced that it is partnering with the USPS to “offerrewards for individuals who report antitrust crimes and related offenses that harm consumers, taxpayers, and free market competition across industries.” In other words, the DOJ is letting an agency that routinely harms consumers and taxpayersuse money it doesn’t have on paying antitrust whistleblowers. The USPS should look in the mirror before it tries to enforce “competition” laws.
The new partnership between the DOJ and USPS—an agency with zero antitrust enforcement cred—is baffling to say the least. For a whistleblower’s report to qualify for a reward under the program, it needs to be “postal-related” in some way. As the law firm WilmerHale notes, “This standard is vague, and the MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] only requires that USPIS [United States Postal Inspection Service] must identify a ‘specific and credible harm’ to the USPS, though the harm need not be substantial or material.” Based on this ridiculous standard, a supermarket employee who is grumpy about her company’s pricing practices or plans to merge with another supermarket can report and receive a reward from the USPS. After all, supermarkets buy and sell stamps and any change to their business practices theoretically has some impact on other business lines.
This setup seems bizarre, at least until one reads the fine print of the MOU. According to the agreement, “After determining the size of the reward, the portion of the criminal fine or penalty remitted to the Postal Service will be set so that the appropriate whistleblower reward is one-half of the amount remitted to the Postal Service. The Postal Service will retain one-half of the amount remitted to the Postal Service, and agrees to pay the whistleblower the other half as the reward.” Both the USPS and the whistleblower get a finder’s fee when the whistleblower’s tip results in a criminal fine.
In other words, this scheme is a cockamamie backdoor way to fund the USPS through other parts of the government. The DOJ is handing the USPS money that it would have otherwise used to fund its enforcement capabilities, with taxpayers presumably making up the difference. Meanwhile, the USPS gets to maintain its fiction that it is “self-funding” and “generally receives no tax dollars”—despite a history of government bailouts.
Even if the USPS thinks this arrangement is financially wise, the truth is that mission creep always costs the agency (and taxpayers) over the long run. The USPS and its enforcement arm the USPIS have a long history of costly mission creep.
According to the USPIS, “We enforce more than 200 federal laws and investigate any crime that involves the mail. ... Postal Inspectors work tirelessly to protect the mail while building cases against anyone who misuses it.” If only this were true. Over the years, the USPIS has repeatedly reached beyond its mandate and gotten involved in cases far removed from stamps, envelopes, and packages. One famous example was in August of 2020, when “gun-toting members of the Postal Service’s investigator unit” arrested Trump acolyte Steve Bannon on his yacht.
Bannon and his business partners were indeed up to no good, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars from an online crowdfunding campaign known as “We Build the Wall” after promising donors that all the money would go toward constructing a border wall. However, this fraud took place over the World Wide Web, and any connection to the USPS is far-fetched at best. It is of course possible that a few donors decided to go the old-fashioned route and mail their donations in to Bannon and company. But this scheme promising 100 percent wall construction was 100 percent a byproduct of the digital age and had nothing to do with the USPS.
Ditto with BitConnect, a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme in which “co-conspirators obtained approximately $2.4 billion from investors [and paid] earlier BitConnect investors with money from later investors.” The DOJ reported in 2021 that the USPIS was “assisting with the liquidation of the cryptocurrency proceeds,” even though the fraud was digital and far removed from the Postal Service.
The USPS would be wise to stop playing internet and antitrust cop. And the rest of the federal government would be wise to recognize the USPS for what it really is—a bumbling monopoly—and stop bankrolling its shenanigans. It’s time to cut this anti-competitive leviathan down to size.