I was writing an authentication wrapper for http and I am passing all my methods through http.request since I do not have (or want) access to base options or the mergeOptions function.

http.request passes RequestMethods.Get to all calls to mergeOptions, which then overwrites my passed method of Post.

https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/modules/angular2/src/http/http.ts#L106

The default method is Get in the base options, so passing Get is redundant, and the arguments to mergeOptions should be rearranged so that method is optional.