On Monday, at Mar-a-Lago, US president-elect Donald Trump stated to reporters, “There is talk about the postal service being taken private, you do know that — not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. It’s a lot different today between Amazon and UPS and FedEx, and all the things you didn’t have. But there is talk about that. It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at that.”
Once again, Trump has set his sights on the United States Postal Service (USPS), one of America’s most hallowed institutions. The USPS, like other agencies and institutions which are intended to be nonpartisan, became increasingly wielded for inappropriate purposes under the Trump administration.
His statements were not of the spur-of-the-moment genre that Trump is renowned for, and the dire implications of such an act should be taken very seriously by the American populace. Trump’s initial efforts to waylay the federal agency were given a grand start when he arrived in office in 2017 to find an empty USPS Board of Governors, due to the blocking of all Obama nominees, thus giving Trump carte blanche to stack the board with a majority of Republican loyalists, most of whom had no knowledge of the workings of the USPS.
In April 2018, Trump, by executive order created the Task Force on the USPS to develop recommendations for reform in order to achieve “a sustainable business model” for the postal service. The proposed reorganisation plans to restructure and potentially privatize the entity failed to gain momentum following the disdain it received from the public, unions and Congress. On 24 April, 2020, Trump threatened to block USPS access to the US$10 billion line of credit approved by the CARES Act, conditioning approval of the loan on the postal service raising package prices. The threat was being used to influence the USPS to increase the charges to Amazon for package deliveries. (Amazon, like UPS and FedEx, frequently uses the national agency for ‘last-mile’ delivery because of its ‘universal service obligation’ which requires it to deliver mail or parcels regardless of distance or profitability concerns, thus often making it the sole carrier that will deliver to all points of the country.) Why target Amazon, the postal service’s largest customer? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was now the owner of the Washington Post newspaper, which persistently investigated the Trump administration and its policies.
On 13 August, 2020, the Associated Press reported, “President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged Thursday that he’s starving the US Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him the election.” In an interview on Fox Business Network, Trump explicitly noted that two funding provisions which the Democrats were seeking in a relief package had stalled on Capitol Hill. Without the additional money, he stated shamelessly, the USPS would not have the resources to handle a flood of ballots from voters who were seeking to avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.
In her historical examination of the USPS, “How the Post Office created America” (2016), American writer Winifred Gallagher traces the flagship government enterprise which was established before the Declaration of Independence. The entity, which in essence served as the central nervous system of the developing country, facilitated the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy. For an extended period of time it was the US government’s largest and grandest venture. The evolution of mail routes and post offices, the utilisation of stage coaches, the Railway Mail Service – which efficiently processed mail aboard moving trains – and the aviation industry demonstrated the institution’s adaptability to the country’s evolving needs. The entity has managed to endure the ravages of the Civil War and two World Wars – just one of the many kinds of adversities it has survived. More recently, the USPS, with the aid of Congress, continued to provide services to the American public during the wrath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past two decades, the federal agency has been bleeding billions of dollars annually, mainly due to the rise of the internet and the reduction of letter mail, and the controversial stipulation of the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act which required the postal service to fully fund the medical benefits for every potential retiree in advance. The Postal Service Reform Act lifted that requirement in 2022.
However, USPS continues to struggle and has reported a tentative $9.5 billion in losses for 2024, under
Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Appointed in 2020, DeJoy, a major Trump donor who possessed no prior knowledge of the workings of the USPS, has been accused of doing his best to run the entity into the ground to justify the privatisation proposal. Under DeJoy’s watch on-time delivery rates have fallen, and he has facilitated the removal and destruction of mail sorting machines which were crucial to the smooth functioning of USPS, and overseen multiple questionable investments. Last week, the Postmaster General even covered his ears while being put through the wringer by the House Oversight Committee for his apparent dismantling of USPS from the inside out.
While the postal service is part of the executive branch, it’s an independent agency, and its operations do not fall under the purview of the president. So, on a whim Trump could not dissolve the USPS by an executive order but he could influence the agency’s future by attempting to starve it of funds. However, the Postal Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7) of the United States Constitution gives Congress the power to establish a postal system. It reads: “The Congress shall have power…To establish post offices and post roads” and “To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” for executing this task.
While the clause grants Congress the power to create a mail system, there’s no stipulation that one must be maintained if created. In 1981 the US Supreme Court ruled, “The power possessed by Congress embraces the regulation of the entire postal system of the country.”
On Monday, President of the American Postal Workers Union Mark Dimondstein in a statement noted, “Privatization would end universal service. Right now, the USPS delivers to every address, regardless of who we are or where we live. Universal service is especially important to rural America. Privatization also would lead to price-gouging by private companies.”
The USPS is more than a 250-odd years entity. It’s home to the USA’s largest unionized workforce; 585,000 employees. It’s an essential lifeline in the trillion-dollar e-commerce industry, for business supply chains, for small businesses, for law enforcement and for disaster response. It is virtually impossible to quantify in monetary terms the value of a national postal system to a country.
The UK privatised the Royal Mail a decade ago, a decision it must now regret after witnessing the disaster it has become. The parent company now plans to resell it to a Czech billionaire. Yesterday, 55,000 Canadian postal workers who were on strike for over a month were ordered back to work by the Canadian Government whilst the Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations were put on hold until May 2025. Allegations of future privatization plans have hovered like a dark cloud over the future job security talks.
Postal services in any country are a necessary public good. A national treasure of such magnitude belongs to the citizens of a country, not in the hands of private individuals.