Postal Police Officers are funded from the Inspection Service’s own budget, while contract guards are funded by USPS operations, the author notes. Image: iStock.com/400tmax
By: Frank Albergo, Postal Police Officers AssociationIn a previous FedWeek op-ed, I chronicled the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s (USPIS) decades-long saga of waste and abuse — from the botched 1990s drug stings and resistance to creating the USPS Office of Inspector General to the billions lost through unchecked mission creep. Those failures were not isolated scandals; they revealed a deeper structural rot, an agency more focused on protecting itself than safeguarding America’s mail system. Now, in Part 2, the picture grows even darker: as mail theft surges to crisis levels, USPIS has layered outright extravagance on top of its dysfunction, squandering resources, dodging accountability, and refusing to reinstate the one capability that consistently deterred postal crime — the Postal Police Force.
The pattern is unmistakable. When faced with a public-safety crisis, the Postal Inspection Service does not adapt. It deflects, obscures, and protects its bureaucracy at all costs.
In the 2020s, the Inspection Service plunged millions into digital surveillance ventures like the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) and its offshoot, the Mail Theft Analytics Program (MTAP). In 2022, the OIG found that iCOP strayed so far off-mission it was secretly trawling Americans’ social media accounts for words like “protest,” “attack,” and “destroy,” with no postal nexus at all — collecting data in ways that exceeded the agency’s legal authority.
In 2023, the OIG reported that MTAP burned more than $1 million over two years but contributed less than 1% of USPIS active mail-theft cases. The OIG could not even determine the purpose of MTAP as there were no performance metrics whatsoever.
In 2024, an OIG review uncovered severe mismanagement of the agency’s $65 million surveillance-equipment inventory — including missing devices, outdated policies, and unauthorized system access — proof that USPIS’s mission creep has become dangerously uncontrolled.
Contracting controls fared no better. In 2022, the OIG found that the Inspection Service was so incompetent in managing its $250 million Prosegur security contract that 30% of security guards lacked proper clearances; required training couldn’t be verified; performance wasn’t measured; and some worksites didn’t even track hours before approving invoices — meaning USPIS literally could not tell whether it was paying for real work or phantom shifts.
The USPIS Slush Fund
In 2025, OIG auditors flagged questionable purchase-card transactions. USPIS spent tens of thousands on prohibited gifts, holiday parties, golf-course outings, steakhouse dinners, engraved knives, jewelry, and other luxury “awards” — but failed to track them as required.
Across 38,000 purchase-card transactions totaling nearly $20 million, auditors found restricted purchases, unlogged awards, and indulgent spending at entertainment venues — unmistakable evidence that USPIS treats postal revenue like a personal expense account, not a public trust.
And then there was the agency’s most audacious vanity project: USPIS spent more than $16 million producing The Inspectors, a CBS Saturday-morning TV drama depicting postal inspectors as fearless, polished crime-fighters — even as real-world mail theft was skyrocketing and the very security mission the show claimed to celebrate was neglected. While the Inspection Service underwrote a Hollywood-style PR project, the worst postal-crime wave in American history was about to explode.
How Mission Failure Became an Operating Model
The 2019 USPS OIG audit of the Inspection Service’s case-management system delivered one of the most devastating assessments in the agency’s history — and it arrived just before mail theft and carrier robberies exploded nationwide. The OIG uncovered that USPIS was prioritizing “area cases” over real criminal investigations. Area cases are not confirmed crimes; they are exploratory probes — often little more than leads, tips, or hunches — that require no identified victim, no verified offense, and frequently no postal connection at all.
Yet the OIG audit revealed that the Inspection Service was pouring the majority of its resources into the cases least connected to its mission. Of the 2.52 million inspector workhours reviewed, 1.35 million hours — 54% — were swallowed by area cases, even though those cases represented just 19% of the caseload. Area cases consumed an average of 986 hours each — nearly five times the roughly 200 hours devoted to jacketed cases.
Documentation was equally deficient. Of 336,238 workhours sampled, 216,749 hours — 64% — had no supporting documentation whatsoever. The OIG estimated this amounted to $11.5 million per year in unsupported work. Compliance failures were widespread: 59% of cases were not updated within the required six months, 48% lacked mandatory reports, and 32% of area cases remained open beyond the three-year policy limit.
A 2025 OIG audit showed USPIS diverting more than 28,000 inspector workhours to Super Bowl and other high-profile event deployments, even as counterfeit postage losses ballooned to an estimated $600 million to $1 billion annually — yet USPIS devoted less than 1% of its caseload to this crime category. USPIS leadership rejected most OIG recommendations.
The Postal Police Force — the only unit designed for direct, on-the-street deterrence — has been systematically dismantled to subsidize this mission drift.
Misaligned Incentives
Postal Police Officers are funded from the Inspection Service’s own budget, while contract guards are funded by USPS operations. Hiring PPOs reduces USPIS discretionary funding; hiring contractors does not. This perverse incentive has fueled the decades-long shift away from sworn officers and toward a bloated, ineffective bureaucracy.
A 2024 GAO review found that despite a $636 million budget, USPIS still has no staffing model — an unprecedented failure in federal law enforcement. Meanwhile, workhours devoted to mail theft collapsed 89% between 2022 and 2024.
The OIG also found strategic goals so vague they could not be measured, unsupported special-event spending, and a pattern of USPIS taking credit for operational improvements performed by USPS operations. USPIS rejected four of five OIG recommendations.
At a July 23, 2025 congressional hearing, USPIS promised to complete its overdue workforce assessment by September 1. Three months later, nothing has been delivered. The FY 2024 Annual Report is still missing.
The Postal Service is in crisis. Letter carriers are being robbed at gunpoint. Criminal networks are raiding mailboxes, stealing arrow keys, and committing financial fraud at scale. Every dollar USPIS wastes is a dollar not spent protecting postal workers and the public.
Congress created the OIG because USPIS could not police itself. Thirty years later, it still cannot.
Waste has consequences.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service has run out of excuses. And the U.S. Postal Service has run out of time. Congress must act.
Frank Albergo is the current national president of the Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA). The PPOA represents uniformed police officers employed by the United States Postal Inspection Service.
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