The USPS has defended the purchase of up to 165,000 new trucks from increasing criticism—for being years late, oddly expensive, strangely inefficient, and only about 10 percent of them being electric—on the grounds that the current fleet is so old they’re bursting into flames and urgently need to be replaced. It further argues at least 5,000 of the vehicles will be electric, but the agency is too broke to buy more than that…

To critics of the purchase, these don’t sound like defenses at all, but further indictments of the decision making that led to it…This whole debate would be moot if not for a strange fact about the new USPS vehicles disclosed in a letter published by the EPA last week. If the vehicles weighed just one pound less, they wouldn’t be permitted on American roads because they pollute too much…

According to its environmental review of the procurement, the new gas delivery trucks have a curb weight of 5,560 pounds and a payload of 2,941 pounds, for a combined vehicle weight of 8,501 pounds. That is almost double the weight of the current USPS delivery vehicle, the LLV…

And, as it happens, 8,500 pounds is the dividing line between a light truck, which the EPA is pushing with increasingly stringent standards that can’t be met by gas cars, and a heavy duty truck, which currently has no timetable for electrification standards. So by a single pound—less than the weight of a single standard Amazon package—the new USPS vehicle will classify as a heavy duty truck, allowing it to not only be gas-powered, but pollute far more.

All to prove the point that efficiency, cost of operation, the regulations designed to increase climate change sensitivity – have been deliberately reversed to get the contract in the hands of a polluting good ol’ boy and ignore the potential of a lighter, cheaper, more energy efficient vehicle that would meet green standards.

And we’re supposed to believe that no one in our government was aware of this bullshit plot in progress. Bah, humbug!