When President Donald Trump said that he might try to take over the U.S. Postal Service, he suggested that he could dramatically improve how Americans send and receive mail. The beleaguered institution, Trump insisted last month, would “operate a lot better.”
Hardly anyone agrees.
The president is reportedly considering an executive order to fire the Postal Service’s board of governors and subsume the independent agency into the Commerce Department. I discussed the plan with lawmakers, union officials, and postal advocates in both parties; nearly all of them told me it would likely degrade America’s mail system and threaten the agency’s ability to provide universal service across the country.
Moving USPS into the executive branch would grant Trump tighter control over the service and could subject it to the indiscriminate cuts driven by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. “What I see happening in these other agencies is likely to happen to the Postal Service,” Philip Rubio, a historian who has written two books on the agency, told me. “And those results will be just as devastating.”
Like many of the president’s early proposals, this one is legally dubious and would surely prompt court challenges. Congress would almost certainly have to approve any change to the structure of the Postal Service, which is a year older than the United States.
The agency is at once cherished by the public—polls show that it’s one of America’s most popular institutions—and pilloried by politicians, who regularly complain about the USPS’s budget deficits and slow service. But few people have attacked the Postal Service more viciously than Trump has. “The Post Office is a joke,” he said during his first term, when he briefly tried to block Congress from bailing out the agency during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. A presidential commission headed by Trump’s first-term treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, recommended privatization—a step that Trump said in December he was “looking at.” According to The Washington Post, he discussed the possibility with Howard Lutnick, the new secretary of commerce, who ran the president’s transition team.
Advocates of the Postal Service say that putting the agency under the Commerce Department would be just as misguided. For one thing, the department is less than one-tenth the size of the USPS, which has more than half a million employees. And although the Trump administration has promised to streamline bureaucracy, his USPS scheme would add another layer of it—one with virtually no relevant experience, John McHugh, a former Republican member of Congress, told me. “The likelihood would be that things would slow down even more,” said McHugh, who now runs the Package Coalition, a group representing some of the Postal Service’s biggest commercial customers. As Rubio told me, “You’re not just moving boxes across town. This would basically be stealing an agency.”
The president has encountered little resistance as he’s cut off foreign aid, kneecapped federal agencies, and attempted to fire thousands of civil servants. Republicans haven’t tried to stop him, and the courts have struggled to keep up. There’s good reason to think that will change, however, if Trump comes after the mail.
The sheer scale of the Postal Service can be difficult to comprehend. It delivers nearly half of the world’s mail and reaches a network that dwarfs those of FedEx and UPS, its main private-sector competitors: some 33,000 post offices and retail centers, and more than 160 million delivery points.
For much of its history, the USPS—originally known as the U.S. Post Office—operated as an extension of the presidency. The position of postmaster general was one of the most powerful jobs in government and usually belonged to a close ally of the president. (Benjamin Franklin was the first.) The thousands of lower-level posts in the agency went to party loyalists as patronage. That arrangement lasted nearly two centuries. Then, in 1970, Congress transformed the department into the independent U.S. Postal Service. Today, the president appoints its board of governors, who serve fixed terms and hire the postmaster general.
That structure has shielded the Postal Service from political influence but not from financial challenges. People have been using the mail less and less for decades. Annual losses have piled up, and Congress accelerated them in 2006 by requiring the agency to prepay billions every year into a health-care pension fund. The struggles of the modern Postal Service have made it a ripe target for reformers and politicians, including some conservatives who have long wanted to privatize it.
In an effort to turn the USPS around, the board in 2020 appointed as postmaster general Louis DeJoy, a logistics-company executive and Trump donor (who announced last month that he is preparing to step down). DeJoy’s connection to Trump initially alarmed Democrats and their allies in the postal unions, who accused DeJoy of sabotaging service during the pandemic to aid Trump’s reelection. But the Postal Service ably handled the high volume of mail ballots, and he later made peace with some Democrats by mustering Republican support for legislation that eased the agency’s pension burden and preserved six-day mail delivery.
In 2021, DeJoy unveiled a 10-year program for the Postal Service called Delivering for America, which tried to account for a national shift in demand from mail to packages. Prioritizing reliability over speed, he scrapped air transportation for mail and the agency’s promise that letters would reach their destination in three days or less.
Four years in, the project appears to be faltering, which Trump could use to try to justify a takeover. In January, the Postal Regulatory Commission issued a scathing assessment of DeJoy’s plan and urged the agency to reconsider it. “Unfortunately, the Delivering for America plan isn’t working. The numbers are frightening,” Art Sackler, who runs the advocacy group Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, told me. (A spokesperson for DeJoy did not respond to a request for comment. The USPS board of governors has reportedly hired a law firm in preparation to sue if Trump threatens its independence; its chair, Amber McReynolds, also did not return requests for comment.)
The political backlash to DeJoy’s plan could be a warning for Trump: It has come from parts of the country that overwhelmingly voted for him. To cut costs, DeJoy proposed reducing mail collection in many rural areas, a decision that infuriated some Republicans in Congress who represent them. “We have waited, and we have waited, and we have waited for better delivery,” GOP Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told DeJoy during a hearing in December. “You’ve exhausted my patience on this.”
Hawley told a local TV station a couple of weeks later that he would oppose any plan to privatize the Postal Service, calling it “a very bad idea.” Yet that’s precisely what some postal-industry leaders think would result from subsuming the agency into the Commerce Department. With more control over the USPS, Trump would face fewer obstacles if he wanted to sell it off, in whole or in part. “It’s a massive step towards breaking up the post office and turning it over to the billionaires,” Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, told me.
Industry advocates are most worried about Trump’s plan because of its likely effect on rural areas. Unlike its private competitors, the agency delivers medications and other important packages to the country’s most remote areas no matter the cost; indeed, when UPS and FedEx take orders in rural areas, it is often USPS that carries packages on the final miles of their journey. Deeper cuts to the agency could endanger that guarantee of universal service, and rural Americans would probably suffer the most.
Democratic Senator Peter Welch of Vermont—by some measures the most rural state in the nation—told me that service is currently so bad that he is open to a reorganization plan, even one that returns the agency to the executive branch. But Trump would have to come to Congress for approval and present a much more specific proposal than anything he’s offered so far. “This is typical of how Trump operates,” Welch said. “There are literally no details here.”
The politicians whose rural constituents would stand to lose the most are the president’s Republican allies, such as Hawley. McHugh, who represented a right-leaning rural district in New York for 16 years, told me that the Postal Service tends to be the last thing lawmakers think about “unless something is going wrong.” Then the outcry is swift and comes from many corners—seniors who rely on the mail, businesses large and small.
“Try to close a post office,” McHugh said. “Your phones will be ringing. There’ll be pickets at your front door.” So far, he noted, GOP lawmakers are keeping quiet about Trump’s postal plan because it hasn’t taken shape and he’s issued no executive order: “Right now, it’s kind of business as usual.” But, McHugh added, “that can change really, really quickly.”
