President-elect Donald Trump says his next administration is revisiting plans to possibly privatize the Postal Service, after repeatedly scrutinizing the agency’s operations during his first term in office.
The first Trump administration unveiled plans to restructure and potentially privatize USPS as part of a 2018 government reorganization plan, but the proposal never gained momentum after pushback from unions and Congress.
“There is talk about the Postal Service being taken private, you do know that — not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. “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.”
The Washington Post reported on Saturday that Trump has discussed privatizing USPS with transition officials — including Howard Lutnick, co-chairman of his transition team and Trump’s pick to run the Commerce Department.
Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said in a statement Monday that privatizing USPS is the “last thing we should be considering as a country.”
“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,” Dimondstein said.
APWU represents more than 200,000 USPS active and retired USPS employees, as well as nearly 2,000 private-sector mail workers.
House Republicans, especially those in support of Trump’s incoming Department of Government Efficiency, expressed support for privatizing some USPS operations at a hearing last week.
House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that USPS is “hemorrhaging red ink,” and suggested the agency privatize its mail processing operations.
“There are private companies that are interested, which is where I think a lot of the problems are,” Comer said at the Nov. 10 hearing.
Comer, however, stopped short of endorsing any plan to privatize the entire agency.
“When we talk about efficiency, especially members on this side of the aisle, we think of privatization, and you’ll have people say, ‘We should privatize the Post Office.’ The problem with that is nobody wants to deliver the mail to every house in America six days a week, and to operate all those retail postal facilities. There’s no private company in the world that wants that,” he said.
Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas), one of three co-chairmen of the Congressional DOGE Caucus, called on DeJoy to designate a point of contact at USPS to work with the new caucus.
The DOGE Caucus will support the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory council outside the federal government led by billionaire businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Sessions told Federal News Network that the DOGE Caucus intends to take a closer look at USPS operations, and identify ways to make the agency more efficient.
“Government efficiency is important. Workforce, personnel issues are important, and money is important,” Sessions said. “I told [DeJoy] that I would want him, in essence, to put a point of contact, that we could run these ideas by, instead of a rather bureaucratic response system that today does not give us back answers.”
USPS is an independent agency that’s generally self-financed by its own revenue, but it does answer to Congress and the federal government.
The president appoints and the Senate confirms members of the USPS Board of Governors, which acts like the board of trustees at a private company.
Congress passes legislation that impacts USPS operations. Lawmakers in 2006 required USPS to pre-fund its retiree health benefits well in advance, which deepened its annual losses. Congress passed a postal reform bill in 2022 that eliminated this pre-funding mandate.
The Postal Regulatory Commission oversees USPS pricing and performance.
The White House generally avoids interfering with the day-to-day operations of USPS. Prior to 1970, the Post Office Department was a Cabinet-level federal agency that received taxpayer funding.
Trump, however, has repeatedly weighed in on USPS operations. In 2020, he said he would block the Treasury Department from giving USPS $10 billion in emergency pandemic relief, unless the agency agreed to significantly raise its package prices. USPS ultimately received the emergency funding without raising its prices.
In a sweeping government reorganization plan during his first term, Trump proposed significantly restructuring and possibly privatizing USPS, noting the agency at the time saw more than a decade of net losses.
Trump launched a USPS task force, led by the Treasury Department, to study ways to restructure the agency. Among its recommendations, the task force called on USPS to rely on contractors to process and sort mail.
USPS hires contractors to handle trucking and logistics work, but DeJoy has begun insourcing some of these operations.
In the Trump administration’s 2018 government reform plan, the Office of Management and Budget wrote that USPS is “caught between a mandate to operate like a business, but with the expenses and political oversight of a public agency.”
“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,” OMB wrote.
OMB added that most international postal operations have gone through significant restructuring, “including shrinking their physical and personnel footprints.”
The 2018 report states that a privatized USPS would have more freedom to set higher prices to deliver mail and packages, but would still receive some pricing oversight from the Postal Regulatory Commission or another agency.
OMB wrote that, under this new model, a private USPS could cut costs more by negotiating more broadly on pay and benefits, “rather than prescribing participation in costly federal personnel benefit programs, and allowing it to follow private sector practices in compensation and labor relations.”
The 2018 report states a decline in mail volume makes it harder for USPS to provide the same level of benefits as the rest of the federal workforce, while also delivering to every address at least six days a week.
“USPS can no longer support the obligations created by its enormous infrastructure and personnel requirements,” OMB wrote.
Trump also doubled down on bringing teleworking federal employees back office back to the office full-time.
“If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump said.
Trump also challenged an agreement that former Social Security Administrator Martin O’Malley reached with the American Federation on Government Employees, locking in current telework levels for SSA employees through 2029.
“They just signed this thing, it’s ridiculous,” Trump said. “It was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.”
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