The U.S. Postal Service was in the news again this week, thanks to a head-spinning series of flipflops by the administration about its plans for the mail.
The president, who has called the U.S.P.S. “a joke,” said before the inauguration that he had “a keen interest in privatizing” the mail service, the Washington Post reported in December. Then, last week, at the swearing-in of Howard Lutnick as secretary of commerce, the president said he was going to move the Postal Service into the Commerce Dept. “We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money,” he said. Lutnick “has got a great business instinct,” he added, “which is what we need.”
The Post reported that the big cheese was about to issue an executive order firing the entire Postal Board of Governors, which experts said would almost certainly be illegal. The governors held an emergency meeting and called their lawyers.
The White House backpedaled, announcing there was no such order in the works. “When Trump was asked about it,” David Dayen wrote in the American Prospect, “he went into his usual mode of bullshitting on something where he has no real plan: he was ‘thinking about doing that’ and ‘looking at it.’ ”
Messing with the mail is probably not a good move for the disrupter-in-chief. A 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center found that Americans give the Postal Service the second-highest rating among all government agencies — topped only by the National Park Service. (That didn’t stop him from firing 1,000 park employees this week.)
Privatizing the U.S.P.S. has long been a dream of those who worship the so-called free market. “A private postal operator that delivers mail fewer days per week and to more central locations (not door delivery) would operate at substantially lower costs,” according to a 2018 proposal from the first Trump regime.
The privateers believe that providing reliable mail delivery to everyone no matter where they live — which is the Postal Service’s mission, established by law — should pay for itself and shouldn’t cost taxpayers anything. No word yet about imposing this same standard on the FBI or the Veterans Administration.
Congress and President George Washington created the Post Office in 1792 with a law that “protected privacy by making it illegal for postal officials to open mail unless it was undeliverable,” according to the National Constitution Center. We now know that protecting privacy is not a priority for the oligarchs envisioning a corporate postal conglomerate.
Privatizing the Postal Service would hit homebound seniors, people in rural areas, and residents of low-income urban neighborhoods hardest, wrote Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute: “The corporations that stand to gain will do so not because they are more efficient than the Postal Service, but because they can shed public service obligations and pay their workers less.”
Do I need to mention that small independent newspapers depend on a Postal Service that is insulated from political influence and retaliation by those who fear a free press?
