Reports suggest that President-elect Donald Trump may pursue a complete overhaul of the United States Postal Service (USPS) in his second term.
According to Axios, three anonymous sources claimed that President-elect Trump had a discussion with his nominee for Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, about what reforming the USPS would look like. The President-elect allegedly said that the federal government should not subsidize the USPS any longer due to frequent recurring losses.
President-elect Trump also “convened a group of transition officials to ask for their views on privatizing the agency” in early December, according to the same report.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the chairwoman of the House of Representative’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Oversight Committee, said on X that “this is what happens when government-run entities are bloated, mismanaged, and unaccountable,” in reference to the USPS.
“It’s time to demand real reform and stop wasting taxpayer dollars,” she added.
Greene’s committee will work directly with the new advisory board of the same name, which will be run by Tesla and SpaceX owner Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. They intend to slash numerous wasteful or meaningless government jobs, and even entire agencies, with President-elect Trump also signaling his support for abolishing the Department of Education.
The USPS has not turned a profit since 2006: In the most recent fiscal year, the USPS lost about $9.5 billion; it lost $6.5 billion in the previous year. Despite this, Congress has continued its efforts to keep the failing agency alive, including passing a $107 billion spending package in 2022 to allegedly help “modernize” the agency.
A spokesman for the USPS issued a statement saying that the agency “is already engaged in an initiative to ensure that we can provide our customers with a high level of service to every delivery address in the nation at least 6-days-a-week in an efficient and financially sustainable fashion as required by law.”
The spokesman added that USPS is seeking “an advisory opinion from our regulator concerning our plan to modernize and optimize our processing and transportation networks.”
The Postal Service has faced widespread criticism in the aftermath of the 2020 election, where mail-in voting skyrocketed due to lockdowns implemented as a result of the Chinese Coronavirus. This led to sudden, last-minute “ballot dumps” that suspiciously changed the results of numerous races, including the presidential election, in favor of Democrats. Combined with the 15 consecutive years of losses, the agency has long been a target by the GOP for privatization in order to make it more efficient.