What I will discuss here, I learned at a public meeting about plans to close the Postal Processing plant in Asheville, NC. Since it is part of a national plan on the part of the Postal Service, it will effect a majority of communities in the country
The Postal Service presentation in Asheville included an explanation of the USPS' "Radical Network Realignment". If you google this phrase, you will find reports of the same discussions in other cities.
There are at present 637 postal processing plants in the US. These are large facilities that run the mail through behemoth machines, canceling the letters, etc. The Realignment plans to reduce the number of these facilities to about 200.
The research behind this Realignment is not publicly available, and would require FOIA applications to receive documentation.
A principle argument of the USPS is that they have bought machines capable of running 24 hours a day, but in smaller cities like mine, they only run 6-8 hours a day. They propose to move mail processing to Greenville, SC (about 65 miles away). 200 employees would be effected. The 250 citizens of Western NC present at the meeting expressed unanimous opposition.
USPS is the only entity in Government required to prepay its pension obligations to the Federal treasury 75 years in advance. This is a primary source of the USPS' deficit. (HR 1351 would provide a remedy, but was blocked in committee on a party line vote).
The same notion of cost and efficiency that drives out-sourcing our manufacturing industries is driving the USPS' realignment plans. I would submit that cost and efficiency are not sufficient justification for the disruption of our communities.