After the postmaster general, Louis Dejoy, a former Trump fundraiser and logistics executive appointed during the president’s first term, announced last month that he was stepping down, defenders of the US Postal Service (USPS) concerned that the 249-year-old institution could soon experience the slice and slash of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” scimitar have expressed alarm.
Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to dissolve USPS’s bipartisan board of governors and place the agency under the control of the commerce department secretary, Howard Lutnick, the Washington Post recently reported.
“We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money, and we’re thinking about doing that, and it will be a form of a merger,” Trump said. “It’ll remain the postal service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better than it has been over the years.”
Trump has made no secret of his desire to reform the federal agency, once calling it Amazon’s “delivery boy”. But it employs 637,000 people and 91% of Americans view it favorably, according to a Pew Research survey taken when USPS was perhaps the most visible federal agency during the Covid pandemic and came close to running out of cash entirely.
In 2020, Trump acknowledged that he was starving the service of money in order to make it harder to process mail-in ballots, which he worried could cost him the election. In December 2024, Trump was reported to have expressed a “keen interest” in privatizing the service.
But until the administration lays out its plan for the institution, resistance to any proposals remains speculative.
“In a moment when public servants are under severe attack, postal workers and the people we serve in every state and every congressional district, are prepared to defend our critical public service,” said the American postal workers union president, Mark Dimondstein, in a statement last week.
DeJoy announced he was stepping down after five years as postmaster general in a letter to the board of governors, saying “there remains much critical work to be done to ensure that the postal service can be financially viable as we continue to serve the nation in our essential public service mission”. He praised postal workers for their perseverance and embrace of change “despite being victimized by a legislative and regulatory business model”.
The service is midway through a 10-year Delivering for America reform plan and has yet to break-even after years of losses, including a $6.9bn in 2025, down from $9.5bn a year earlier.
DeJoy said a $144m profit, excluding expenses on pension and health care payments, in the first quarter of the year was a “strong indicator” that the service is on a path to self-supporting but warned there is an “almost unceasing resistance to change from stakeholders motivated by both parochial and political purposes”.
The US Postal Service was founded on 26 July 1775 by the Second Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general. Later that century, postal services were made a permanent part of the federal government as the Post Office Department, and in 1971 was reorganized to become an independent agency of the executive branch, but it must operate like a business.
The pandemic, along with competition from FedEx and UPS, as well as a decline in the overall letter business, has made the USPS a political football and put it in its current precarious financial predicament. A study by the Economic Policy Institute in 2020 said that “anti-government ideologues and special interests have long sought to privatize, shrink, or hobble” the service.
The report credited the postal service as an integral public service, part of the nation’s critical infrastructure and a good employer – especially for Black workers and military veterans.
“The social value of the postal service extends beyond the economic benefits provided by its delivery operations,” the report said, by connecting family and friends and fostering democracy, and is a key part of emergency and national security infrastructure.
The report recommended that the service be allowed to adapt to meet unmet needs, including the revival of postal banking.
In a letter last month, the postal service’s regulator warned the next phase of the 10-year cost-cutting and modernization plan would slow mail delivery for a “significant portion of the nation” but wouldn’t do much to help regain its financial footing. The communities most likely to affected would be in rural areas where, demographics show, Trump voters are often in the majority.
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The long, conflicting political efforts to dismantle the post office, may now be about to accelerate, says the former North Carolina postmaster Mark Jamison, a contributor and adviser to savethepostoffice.com.
“They’re travelling down the same road and Congress has abdicated all its responsibilities,” he says, venturing that DeJoy may have stepped down in part because he could no longer protect the institution from Trump’s designs.
“DeJoy had been there for a few years and may have felt some attachment to the institution and had absorbed some of the culture there. They’re watching what’s happening, waiting for Elon Musk to come in and tear things up, and he didn’t want to be a part of that.”
The Washington Post reported that the board of governors had held an emergency meeting and retained outside counsel if the White House moves ahead with the measures. Democrats also called on Trump to abandon his plans.
“Your reported efforts to dismantle the Postal Service as an independent agency would directly undermine the affordability and reliability of the US postal system,” said the House oversight committee member Gerry Connolly of Virginia last week.
“We urge you to abandon immediately any plans that would either privatize the Postal Service or undermine the independence of the Postal Service.”
There’s a fundamental difference in how Republicans and Democrats look at the issue.
“I see the post office as part of the national infrastructure, like the highway system, and a network that has the ability to go to everyone’s house,” says Jamison.
What Musk and Doge are in fact doing, he ventures, is treating the federal government as a private equity firm would a company after a hostile takeover. “You fire everybody, then figure out what works afterwards – and Wall Street loves it.”
Article by:Source: Edward Helmore
