Pretty soon you're talking real money.
As we prepare to leave Afghanistan, plans are underway at the Pentagon to destroy $1.2 billion of perfectly useful ammunition and missiles.
"Despite years of effort, the Army, Navy and Air Force still don't have an efficient process for doing something as basic as sharing excess bullets. This Government Accountability Office (GAO) report clearly shows that our military's antiquated systems lead to millions of dollars in wasteful ammunition purchases."
To say nothing of wasteful destruction.
Not to be upstaged in terms of overall waste, the USPS Postmaster General decided to kill the popular and money-saving startup, Outbox, even though cooperating with them would save the USPS billions of dollars. Outbox developed a method of ridding their customers of junk mail though agreements with Austin and San Francisco post offices: after customers signed up, the post offices held the mail, and Outbox picked it up.
They wanted to allow consumers to digitize all of their postal mail so that individuals could get rid of junk mail, keep important things organized and never have to go out to their mailbox again. They set out to “redefine a long cherished but broken medium of communication: postal mail.” Customers would opt-in for $5 a month with “Outbox” to have their mail redirected, opened, scanned and available online or through a phone app. Consumers could then click on a particular scanned letter and ask that it be physically delivered, or that certain types of letters not be opened (e.g., bills etc.).
Their customers loved the service, and the post offices saved money by not having to physically deliver to those customers. It seemed like a win-win. Outbox made big news, and that's when the two co-founders were called to Washington, D.C. to meet with the Postmaster General. They thought that USPS wanted to discuss further expansion. They couldn't have been more wrong.
When Evan and Will got called in to meet with the Postmaster General they were joined by the USPS’s General Counsel and Chief of Digital Strategy. But instead, Evan recounts that US Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe “looked at us” and said “we have a misunderstanding. ‘You disrupt my service and we will never work with you.’” Further, “‘You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren’t our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers.”’
Well, that certainly cleared things up in a hurry. As Outbox now could no longer pick up all of their customers' mail at the post offices, they tried a different tack: buying vehicles, hiring drivers, and sending them around to each customer's address to pick up the mail. The additional financial burden was unsustainable, and the company was recently forced to shut down.
In February, 2014, they announced on their blog that they were shutting down their company because they could not profitably scale the company unless the Post Office allowed consumers to forward their mail.
In their parting message, they explained, “You may think government organizations are completely, insanely backwards; you are wrong—they are worse.”
In FY 2013, USPS posted a loss of $5 billion. But at least they killed digital mail, and can continue to "serve their customers" - which according to them, does not mean you.
Don't worry, though; Democrat Senate Majority Leader Hairy Reed has studied the situation carefully:
