The latest government agency that President Donald Trump wants to disrupt is older than America itself.

In its 250 years, the U.S. Postal Service has delivered Revolutionary War battle plans, America’s first newspapers, countless absentee ballots, bank services to the underserved and care packages to soldiers on war fronts. For one ill-conceived year, it even delivered children.

Created amid danger and subterfuge, it was a necessary part of our nation’s fight for independence. It wasn’t always profitable. And for generations, our leaders were okay with that.

“The sooner the better, for the publick Good,” wrote the Virginia Gazette in July 1774 on the news that a back-channel communication network that would become today’s Postal Service, the Constitutional American Post Office, was expanding its routes and flourishing as an alternative to the tax-grubbing, toxic mess that the British Postal Service, the Parliamentary Post, had become.

Benjamin Franklin became head of the Parliamentary Post in 1753, which allowed him free distribution of his own newspaper. And he obsessed over making the service efficient and profitable. Franklin used an odometer on postal carriage wheels to streamline delivery routes and created round-the-clock service to get mail delivered at astonishing speeds, overnight even, according to the Benjamin Franklin Historical Society.

It became wildly profitable, which delighted the Crown.

While it was “inevitably at first expensive” to make all of those improvements, Franklin wrote, “it soon after began to repay us; and … we brought in to yield three times as much clear revenue to the crown as the postoffice of Ireland.”

But, it was the Crown, after all. By this time, it was the enemy.

The British were opening and reading the mail, making it impossible for revolutionaries to share plans and strategies in private.

And the high postage rates were just another form of taxation (without representation).

William Goddard capitalized on the colonists’ discontent and formed the Constitutional Post. A secure way to communicate, it was the 1774 version of encrypted mail. It became instantly popular.

By that time, Franklin had his own scandal. He was living in London, running the Parliamentary Post remotely. But it all blew up when an anonymous source dropped him a bundle of letters written by Thomas Hutchinson, the loyalist governor of Massachusetts, outlining his plans to suppress the revolutionaries. Franklin leaked them, according to the U.S. Postal Museum.

That got him fired by the British but lionized back home.

When he returned, the Second Continental Congress took over Goddard’s Constitutional Post and appointed Franklin to run it.

After the Declaration of Independence was signed, it was renamed the Post Office of the United States.

By signing the 1792 Postal Service Act, President George Washington not only established an impressive network of postal roads from Maine to Georgia, he established a vital tool in our democracy.

The Postal Service did more than keep businesses and families connected, it became an instrument of free speech.

The act guaranteed that newspapers would be spread across the nation at affordable rates — 1 cent if the paper traveled less than 100 miles and 1.5 cents if it had to be carried more than 100 miles.

That thing where the British opened the mail? Here’s how our founders dealt with it: If any employee opens or takes a letter or parcel, “he shall, on conviction, for any such offence, suffer death,” according to Section 17 of the Act.

The Postal Service’s reach was breathtaking.

It was “the great link between minds,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville on his tour of America in 1831, when the young and sprawling nation already had twice as many post offices as Britain and five times as many as France.

“There is an astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers among these savage woods,” de Tocqueville wrote. “I do not think that in the most enlightened rural districts of France there is intellectual movement either so rapid or on such a scale as in this wilderness.”

As the nation expanded westward, the Postal Service kept pace.

An American frontier? Hello, Pony Express, a relay of riders on horseback who could get a letter across the nation in 10 days.

An Alaskan tundra? Postal carrier Ed Biederman used a dog sled to deliver mail across a 160-mile route, according to the U.S. Postal Museum.

By the 1840s, as the cost of mailing climbed, capitalism threatened the U.S. Postal Service. Private carriers began offering cheaper rates.

It was time for the nation to decide what the Postal Service meant to America, to address “the argument that Congress never intended the Post Office to cover costs, but rather intended that it be used for great purposes of national welfare,” wrote Jane Kennedy in a 1957 article on the structure of postal rates in the Journal of Political Economy.

So in 1845, Congress cut delivery prices and stomached the idea that the Postal Service wouldn’t return to the profitability that Franklin had once coaxed out of the British Parliamentary Post.

The Civil War, a time when delivery was limited to Union states, gave the post office a chance to fatten its coffers and improve services. In those years, the Railway Mail Service was expanded and money orders were developed. The Postal Savings System began providing basic banking services to average citizens ignored by big financial institutions in 1911.

In 1913, it began a parcel service, removing the four-pound cap on package weight.

Absurdity ensued as Americans went from sending letters to mailing coffins, eggs, dogs — and even children.

The first human package was believed to be the 10-pound infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Beauge of Glen Este, Ohio, National Postal Museum historian Nancy Pope told The Washington Post.

The baby was delivered a mile away to Grandma’s house for 15 cents, Pope said.

For one wild year, postal carriers were like Uber for kids, escorting them down the street or hundreds of miles away. The most famous child package was May Pierstorff, whose journey on an Idaho railcar, in a coat covered in stamps, became a children’s book, Mailing May.

By 1914, the postmaster general put a stop to human mailing.

During World War I, airmail was the wind beneath the aviation industry’s wings as millions of packages and letters were sent to soldiers deployed to the front lines, according to the National Postal Museum.

The next big change came in 1970, when a postal workers’ strike and budget struggles spurred Congress to pass the Postal Reorganization Act. That gave carriers a raise and turned the agency into an independent, corporation-government hybrid.

“There is no Republican way or Democratic way to deliver the mail,” President Richard M. Nixon said when he signed the bill that August. “There’s only the right way, and that’s what this occasion is all about.”