How do you figure? Establishing Post Offices is a Constitutionally enumerated power of Congress, and the USPS exists as a Federal Agency since the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 [1]:
> The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people.
While I don't necessarily agree, the argument is that the 1970 postal reorganization act required the postal office to be self funded, and that since they are not funded with any federal dollars they are somewhere between a government service and a private service. Some argue that because of this we have seen a significant degredation in the quality of mail, because the USPS explicitly and intentionally delivers the equivilent of spam mail to every address in the country. They do this as a form of generating revenue that wouldn't be required of a proper government service. This ties into the current post as it seems plausible the reason USPS shares customer data with Meta is due to their requirement of self funding.
> since they are not funded with any federal dollars they are somewhere between a government service and a private service.
This argument makes no sense at all to me (I did catch the part where you don't necessarily agree either btw).
There's no law which says that everything a government does has to be run at a pure loss on tax revenue. Many local utilities are owned by their respective governments, and are not infrequently run at a modest profit. That doesn't make them private, it makes them profitable.
> Some argue that because of this we have seen a significant degredation in the quality of mail, because the USPS explicitly and intentionally delivers the equivalent of spam mail to every address in the country.
This is quite possibly the case, but has no bearing on whether or not USPS is a government entity, which, it is.
> This ties into the current post as it seems plausible the reason USPS shares customer data with Meta is due to their requirement of self funding.
This, I do not consider plausible at all. I'm 99% sure that some youngster working on the digital side of USPS added some tracking pixels because it's all they knew how to do.
What do they "govern"? They distribute junk for advertisers. That's the majority of their existence. Can you imagine their carbon footprint? Driving to almost every US address 6 days a week to leave junk mail that 99% of goes straight to the trash. But I'm supposed to drive an EV or take the bus???
