Back in April of this year, we brought you an episode titled Death Cab for the Postal Service.

In it, we talked about what makes the USPS a singular institution, a great example of something

the United States did right in a time when we're surrounded by examples of things we're doing wrong.

But we also talked about some of the financial woes facing the United States Postal Service

and the implications for our election this year. Shortly after that episode, President Trump put a

guy named Louis DeJoy in charge of USPS. DeJoy didn't have any experience within the institution,

but he was a big political donor to Donald Trump. And since then, the crisis at the Postal Service

has become dramatically worse and seems all but sure to have massive implications, not only on

the integrity, but the outcome of our election. And the country is really beginning to notice.

People are protesting, people are buying stamps for the first time in their lives,

indie folk star Taylor Swift is tweeting about it, and most importantly, over the weekend,

Nancy Pelosi decided to cut Congress's summer vacation short to deal with this mess.

Adam Clark Estes, you've been covering the story for ReCode and Vox. When exactly did this get like

end the summer recess level bad? There's been a slow build in dissatisfaction with the mail in

recent weeks. A new story started to come out earlier in August that the new postmaster general

was slowing down the mail intentionally taking cost-cutting measures and doing stuff like

banning overtime. But I think it really hit its breaking point at the end of last week when

news came out that the Postal Service had sent letters to 46 states, Andy C saying that

election mail was probably not going to arrive on time for the election, which is a huge deal.

Obviously, and I think that that really mobilized people around the idea that

slowing down mail can have a really serious consequence when the election comes around. And the

slowdown appears to be intentional in coming from this new postmaster general who is a top-trump

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