“It’s a logistics story first and foremost, but it’s been reported as a Donald Trump story,” says journalist Alex Shephard of all the recent reporting on the United States Postal Service. “When you look at the full story of why the USPS is in crisis, it’s much more complicated and interesting.”

Today on the show, Alex joins us to tell this story, which he argues we need to understand if we’re going to fix this vital American institution. Over the course of the hour, he and host Patty Peltekos along with co-pilot Yuri Rashkin discuss the financial history of the USPS, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, the role of Congress in creating postal reform, the postal service’s “sweetheart deal” with Amazon, the problem of public services being asked to be run like for-profit businesses, why concerns about vote by mail are unfounded, and more.

Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic and co-founder of the digital magazine Full Stop. You can read his piece “Why the Media Is Uniquely Terrible at Covering the U.S. Postal Service” here.

Cover photo by Sam LaRussa on Unsplash