President Donald Trump has found yet another way to turn the United States Postal Service into a tool for his political obsessions. This time, the target is privacy, with postal trucks slated to carry cameras that continuously record as workers travel their routes.

The plan fits a pattern in which Trump tries to deploy the USPS far beyond delivering mail. Postal workers are now being pulled toward a roving surveillance operation under the soothing and spectacularly unconvincing banner of community safety.

First came Trump’s effort involving mail in ballots, a scheme under which the USPS would effectively run elections nationwide and threaten to run them into the ground. The Supreme Court stopped that plan, at least for the midterms.

Then came a census proposal that would have postal workers going door to door instead of trained census workers. Postal employees are not trained for that job, and millions of people do not have physical addresses regularly visited by postal workers.

Now the administration has turned its attention to the many trucks operated by the Postal Service. According to 404 Media, a pilot program involving cameras supplied by the commercial company Next Base is already in place.

Those cameras “continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks” as part of an effort presented as improving “community safety.” Given this administration’s record as described in the source, that justification lands with all the credibility of a soggy campaign flyer.

The cameras are intended for use on 100 vehicles in Washington, D.C. They face forward and automatically begin recording when a postal worker drives away from the postal facility.

Postal workers received a brief letter explaining the program, but that letter did not say what would happen to the data collected along their routes. It offered only the assurance that “all postal insignia and postal employee images will be redacted.”

That narrow promise leaves the central questions untouched. The letter does not explain who will access the recordings, how the information will be stored, or what the administration intends to do with the resulting collection of roadway and sidewalk imagery.

A USPS spokesperson told 404 Media that the pilot “includes privacy safeguards.” The Postal Service did not provide details explaining what those safeguards are, leaving workers and the public with a vague reassurance instead of meaningful answers about a federal camera program.

Nothing disclosed about the pilot establishes how continuously recording roads, signs, sidewalks, and everything visible along postal routes would enhance postal worker safety. Instead, workers are being pressed into service as participants in Trump’s expanding surveillance apparatus.

The stated mapping purpose also looks remarkably flimsy because Google Maps has mapped roads and sidewalks for years. What this program adds is a fleet of government vehicles recording throughout their daily routes while postal employees simply try to do their actual jobs.

At the same time, the administration is already collecting enormous amounts of automatic license plate reader camera data from Flock and Axon. Cities are effectively being forced to allow their information to be aggregated into federal servers, where the administration can use it for its own purposes.

Washington, D.C., is the obvious testing ground for this dystopian experiment because Trump can exert control there that he could not impose on states. The program places the first 100 camera equipped vehicles in a city where his administration already wields exceptional power.

That same control is why Trump can keep the National Guard deployed in Washington through 2029 at a cost of $1.4 billion. The source describes that deployment as serving his fantasy that the city would otherwise become a crime ridden hellhole.

The administration may call this community safety, but its refusal to explain the fate of the collected data makes that sales pitch difficult to swallow. Postal workers should be delivering letters and packages, not operating a government surveillance fleet that watches communities throughout every route.