Steve Hutkins, an associate professor of literature at the Gallatin School at New York University, is the editor of the blog "Save the Post Office."

This plan to close 250 processing plants, on top of plans to shutter 15,000 of the nation’s 32,000 post offices and slash 225,000 postal jobs, will do nothing but hasten the Postal Service’s downward spiral.

The Postal Service should reduce its outsourcing to private companies, which now get $12 billion worth of business. Postal employees could do much of that work.

Slower delivery times, making people travel further to a post office, and eliminating Saturday delivery will force people to seek alternatives like private mail companies and the Internet. Revenue declines will accelerate, necessitating even deeper cuts, until there’s nothing left to cut. And it’s all so unnecessary.

The so-called “crisis” we’re witnessing is a manufactured emergency, a strategy of “shock and awe” designed to finish the job started in 1970, when the Department of the Post Office was turned into a government agency that was supposed to act “like a business.” The ultimate goal is privatization (or at least “liberalization”) of the postal system, the path taken by many European countries. The main forces behind this agenda are the anti-government, anti-union corporate elite and right-wing think tanks and politicians. The biggest advocates of the current push to downsize are stakeholders in the bulk mail industry — for whom lower U.S.P.S. operating costs mean lower postage rates — and other businesses (like FedEx and pre-sort companies) that stand to gain a bigger piece of the mail industry pie.

The way to save the Postal Service is to have Congress undo the requirement that postal employees pay $5 billion a year to pre-fund retiree health care benefits for the next 75 years, return some of the $75 billion surplus that those workers have paid into their retirement funds, and give the Postal Service the opportunity to expand its products and services — particularly those that will benefit the vast majority of Americans and not just business mailers. And rather than rationalizing the downsizing by pointing to "excess capacity," the Postal Service should reduce its outsourcing to private companies (which now get $12 billion worth of business). Much of that work could be done by postal employees.

Radically downsizing the Postal Service will not save the post office — it will destroy it. These heartless cost-saving measures will do irrevocable harm to the families of thousands of postal workers and thousands of communities across the country. Wake up, America. They’re coming for the post office.