It's been up over 600,000, and it's gone down from that.
The important characteristic is that PRODUCTIVITY ~ pieces of mail handled per employee ~ CLIMBED 700% from 1966 to 2004 (which is the part I'm responsible for).
Without the adoption of modern methods, intense use of computers to control every aspect of the business, and the use of OCR technology it couldn't have been done.
BTW, the Post Office Department was abolished and the United States Postal Service was created to do the job ~ without the use of tax dollars.
That's one of the reasons there are people who like to drop postal workers from the totals.
Well Kudos to the USPS. Bravo that their productivity is up massively.
That doesn’t explain why you are going to the ends of the earth to defend the other federal agencies.
As to why people drop the USPS from the total is that it’s not exactly a federal agency. It is an independent agency which doesn’t work off of tax dollars. As such it has appreciably more incentive to live within its means and increase productivity than actual federal agencies. Those places can just whine for more tax dollars when they need something.
The main thing the USPS gets from the feds is the exclusive rights to carry first class mail. Of course that’s not quite worth what it once was.