Good news! Everyone knows the Postal Service is in trouble, but now we have strong leadership to set things straight. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has instituted a new policy called Optimized Collections. Optimization is the act of making something as perfect and functional as possible!

Or, well. Something else.

See, the postmaster reasons that he can save a bunch of money by decreasing the amount of miles the postal fleet travels, moving mail. To that end, less mail will be moved. In thousands of post offices around the country, particularly in rural areas, a big truck will show up in the morning with the mail and packages. And then, instead of the truck coming back in the afternoon to pick up whatever has been collected—all the letters, all the packages, all the things the customer has grown accustomed to believing would be postmarked and sent toward their destinations that same day—maybe that truck won’t come back. Big savings! After all, there will be another truck coming the next morning, and that truck can efficiently pick up all the stuff from the day before.

Well, DeJoy is yet another stellar Trump appointment, so he’s following in the same optimization path that they want to do for health care: save a bunch of money by not offering any. Throw everyone on Obamacare off the insurance, encourage them to economize on treatment, and let attrition work its actuarial magic.

Similarly, a good vegetable garden can be optimized with enough concrete. Education is super efficient when you strip out History and Civics or boil the whole thing down to the Ten Commandments. Mr. DeJoy himself could be neatly optimized with a little amputation here and there. Seems to me.

It’s estimated 14,000 of the nation’s 31,000 post offices will be Optimized by September, just in time for the election, and there are no plans to notify affected customers. Think your mail-in ballot is going to get postmarked today if you put it in a collection box? Ha ha! Better luck next election! You could put it in one of those ballot drop boxes but, coincidentally, people are being threatened with jail time for dropping in their neighbors’ ballots for them. (The election of Republicans is optimized by discouraging voting.)

Not long before I signed on to the blue, downtown carriers were still doing two deliveries per day. Sometimes mail got picked up and delivered in the same day. Certainly we took pride in timely delivery. All that stuff we picked up along our routes was going to be postmarked and on its way by evening. Every letter counted. Okay, one time when I was on my first three months’ probation time, I tossed some outgoing mail into a tray and watched in horror as one of the letters smacked into the Jeep window and slipped down into the inside of the door. And I didn’t report it. That was totally, utterly wrong. But hey. I’d already hit a house with my truck and thought I might lose my job. EXCEPT FOR THAT ONE LETTER and the house thing, I was an efficient and functional employee.

Postmaster DeJoy would have seen that lost letter as one more mark of savings. Shit, if we could get everyone to quit sending mail altogether, we’d be at maximum efficiency.

I believe that is what he has in mind.

If you’re responsible for the efficient collection and delivery of mail and you add a full day to the delivery time of half the nation’s mail, and call it “optimization,” you are not a post office person. You’re a tool for the plutocracy. It’s ingenious. Your numbers still look great, because the postmark is delayed a day also, but the person who put the mail in the stream isn’t aware their mail is in limbo, even if it’s a ballot. With every stroke of your pen you destroy the service entrusted to you until it is ultimately parceled out to private profit which will surely do a more efficient job.

You can’t fault DeJoy for taking that long view. All that money we’ll be saving on mail delivery? We’ll scoop it right into the wealthiest pockets and the engine of our economy will be revving again. Something will be trickling down, anyway.