President Donald Trump is taking aim at the US Postal Service.  According to a Thursday report from the Washington Post‘s Jacob Bogage, the president plans to fire the members of USPS’ board and hand the keys to the agency over to the Department of Commerce. Trump plans to make the move through executive order as early as this week, the Post reports. The board reportedly intends to take the administration to court if Trump carries out the firings or tries to take control, with postal experts telling the Washington Post that absorbing the independent agency would likely violate federal law. A White House spokesperson later denied the report. After his re-election, Trump discussed privatizing the Postal Service with Howard Lutnick—later confirmed as Commerce Secretary—at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a separate Post article from December. But Trump’s new target is actually an old one. During his first term, the White House pushed to break up and sell off the Post Office—one of the most favorably viewed government agencies—in a 2018 plan: “A privatized Postal Service would,” among other things, “make business decisions free from political interference.”  On February 20, Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees, issued a statement calling Trump’s reported plan an “unlawful attack” that was “part of the billionaire oligarch coup.” The move would increase costs and threaten the livelihoods of more than 7 million workers, Dimondstein said.  “Call your senator,” the union posted on X on Friday. “Urge them to block this unconstitutional takeover and ensure the Postal Service remains independent and in the hands of the people!” I previously spoke with Dimondstein about the threat Trump and DOGE present to the Postal Service. People who rely on USPS for essentials like medicine could be particularly at risk if the agency is privatized or loses its political independence, Dimondstein told me. Instead of privatizing the USPS, Dimondstein thinks the government should consider expanding it, pointing to opportunities for offering financial services for tens of millions of Americans with low incomes who are unbanked or underbanked—long a norm in many other countries. According to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization, USPS is an “equalizer institution” that could allow access to free or low-fee bank accounts, as well as loan and check cashing services. USPS also provides outsized job opportunities for women, Black workers, other workers of color, and veterans, he said.  Then there’s the role USPS plays in elections. As my colleague Pema Levy pointed out at the time, Democrats wanted to increase funding for the service prior to the 2020 election, to help deliver mail-in ballots at the height of the Covid pandemic—but Republicans dissented.  Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general of the USPS and a Trump donor who earlier this week announced plans to step down, caused an uproar during that time. DeJoy made significant changes just before the 2020 vote, including scaling back the number of mail sorting machines and limiting the ability of workers to make additional postal trips where they would draw overtime. Critics said that those decisions restricted the agency’s ability to serve mail-in voters during the pandemic—something that disproportionately hurt Democrats (according to the Elections Performance Index, 58 percent of Democrats voted by mail, while only 29 percent of Republicans did so in 2020).  Despite the postal service’s mandate to exist independently—passed by Congress and signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970—the agency may, if Trump can override Congress, become one more brick in the wall of expanded executive power.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here. At a December 2024 press conference in Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump said his administration would be looking into privatizing the United States Postal Service, renewing efforts from his first presidential term to limit government programs and services. The Washington Post reported that same month that Trump stated the government should not subsidize the agency due to its annual financial losses.  “The days of bailouts and handouts are over,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) said during a December 2024 hearing with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “The American people spoke loud and clear…there’s going to be significant reform over the next four years.”  To understand more about what’s happening with USPS and get a better sense of where calls for government cuts are coming from, I talked with Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union. The union represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The Trump administration and groups like DOGE are pushing for more cuts to the federal government. For USPS, the argument seems to be that the mail system loses money and is no longer relevant, and therefore, should be curtailed. What do you think about this perspective? To me, DOGE is a question of billionaire oligarchs trying to figure out how to get more money into their private profits. So all of this stuff about efficiency is really a cover for that, and that also carries over to those who want to privatize the Post Office. The Post Office takes in about $80 billion a year in revenue. Those on the private side of the industry want their hands on that money because when it’s in the public domain, they can’t use it to generate private profits.  What’s the value of the Post Office? I think the way that people communicate has changed fundamentally. I’m sure it changed when Morse code came in, when the telephone came in, and it certainly has changed with the advent of the internet. But change doesn’t mean that the Post Office no longer has tremendous value.  With the advent of the internet, you had this tremendous growth of e-commerce. The Postal Service is vital if e-commerce is going to work for everybody, particularly on the small business side. On the customer side, the Post Office is there by law for every single person, no matter who we are and where we live. If it were to be privatized, then the decisions on who gets to engage in e-commerce or who gets medicine through the mail would depend on whether a company can make a profit. The Post Office is based on non-profit, and it’s based on service. So it’s changing, but it’s invaluable.  Then there’s less tangible things like helping in natural disasters. The Post Office could really do a lot more than they do now—if they were allowed to—in terms of getting water and supplies in the stricken areas and the rebuilding that follows. You also have the whole question of democratic rights, the question of voting by mail, the question of access to the ballot box. The Post Office provided millions of people in this last election access to the ballot box.  What could be accomplished if—instead of privatizing USPS—we expanded it? The Post Office can do and should do a lot more than it does. There are all sorts of opportunities for expanded services. There’s new opportunity for financial services—tens of millions of low-income people are either unbanked or underbanked. In many parts of the world, people do basic banking and financial services through a public postal service. People like Elon Musk are virulently anti-union. The Post Office is one of the largest unionized workforces in the country. And what the unions have brought to the postal workers is equal pay for equal work—opportunities for women workers, for Black workers, and workers of color who are usually marginalized and don’t have the same opportunities. We’re the largest employer of veterans outside of the Defense Department. So all of those things are mixed in. There has been a lot of work against previous attempts to privatize USPS. Do you think these pushes for privatization will be any different with the new Trump administration? There’s been constant efforts to piecemeal privatization of the Postal Service, and some of that has taken hold. There was Staples [starting in 2013], and a couple decades before, there was a similar effort for Sears’ department stores to do the retail. If the postal service gets turned over to the private sector, then prices are going to go up and service is going to go down. And what happens if that private company no longer can or wants to do it and people lose their services?  The White House in 2018 advocated for the breaking up and the selling off of the public postal service. So that’s a whole different level [of privatization].  What should people take away from these ongoing discussions about cutting USPS? The Post Office is the low-cost anchor of the package industry. What’s keeping the rates and the package rates lower than they would be otherwise is because the Post Office is in the public domain. That’s one of the reasons why some of these big package companies would like to make it harder on the Post Office through more privatization. That low-cost anchor helps serve everybody.