People who read the news definitely say the military loses money, because they can’t pass an audit and have repeatedly reported, themselves, that they have lost money. (Just before the September 11 attack one of the big headlines was that the military had lost $1 trillion, which of course got bumped out of the news, and they just said the other day that they now can’t account for another $2 trillion.) The money is pretty certainly being stolen in some way — deliberate overpayments, transactions without oversight which go unreported, illegal transactions which are deliberately left off the books, bribes which are considered necessary to the institutional goals of the military but which would never pass muster with the public, you name it.

Meanwhile, the USPS has always run very close to the break-even point (usually within a few percent of their revenue stream either way, and well within the ability of Congress to fix merely by boosting the price of service, particularly commercial mail — by law, the USPS does not set its own prices and has to ask Congress for adjustments), up until the 2005 law which required them to fund 75 years’ worth of benefits for all employees in advance, a requirement no other public or private institution has ever been forced to obey, which immediately created tens of billions in “debt”. This requirement was passed with overwhelming, almost unanimous, bipartisan support, but was dreamed up by the right wing specifically to make the USPS seem unviable in order to serve as a platform to attack the Postal Workers Union and benefit private delivery companies like UPS and FedEx. This requirement has only been repealed this year (March 2022) and the change will not show up in this year’s financial reporting.