The IPS article you referenced is not un-biased, considering who commissioned the article: American Postal Workers Union. Also, despite them attesting to being non partisan, mediabiasfactcheck.com has them listed as leaning pretty far left, but factual.

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Time to piss off everybody here: you are both right and wrong.

From my firsthand experience with working with the USPS, they are the most ass-backwards organization in the US government. They have antiquated practices and technology, and more importantly, leadership. They are slow to act, slow to change, and in general, have a don't give a shit attitude. They are one of the few US government agencies that are unionized (actually, two), which leads to a variety of issues you do not see in other government agencies. They are the very definition of bureaucracy, and a lot of their challenges are self inflicted. On the plus side, they are cheap and serve the public good. On the negative side, they lose tons of money on parcels, which is a horrible business model.

For the folks that have not paid attention to the USPS before maybe two weeks ago, a lot of the things that you see with shutting down machines, etc have been common practices for many years, regardless of administration. They have deep, systemic issues that throwing billions of dollars at right now will not fix, and definitely not before the election. Fundamentally, the USPS needs to be rearchitected to address the new economy of mail (first class mail is down, junk and parcels are up). Personally, I would love to see the USPS provide banking services again to help serve those that are underbanked and underserved. That is a relatively easy thing you can do now to help reorient the Postal service.

Now, with that being said, I am disgusted that they are doing these things now, during a pandemic, and leading up to the election. The optics of this are horrible, and anything that causes doubt about our election system is a bad thing. Regardless of which idiotic party you pull for, nobody is going to be happy that the vast majority of this election is going to be conducted via mail. The media stories are going to be either "voter fraud" or "my vote was not counted in time", or both. As with most things, the truth will be somewhere in the middle. Regardless, these shenanigans do have an impact on the election and as an American, I think that sucks.