President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly weighing a plan to make significant changes to the United States Postal Service. These proposed changes could include privatizing the agency, a course of action that, if pursued, would be a political and legal catastrophe.
Trump has a mandate and the broad goodwill of the people. Republicans have control of both chambers of Congress and a friendly conservative majority on the Supreme Court. The party has big plans to modernize the federal government, end wasteful spending, cut taxes, and end the scourge of illegal immigration.
All of these plans have broad popular support, and as the incoming administration prepares to enact these policies, the people have given the president-elect a windfall of public approval. If Trump and the party are successful in implementing these policies, it could set the party up for a broad popular mandate for years to come.
The only way to derail this honeymoon of public approval is for the administration to launch headfirst into a policy project that has little public support and will run into significant legal hurdles. Privatizing the postal service is exactly such a policy project.
The USPS is the oldest federal government agency. It predates the Constitution and even the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution itself tasks Congress with “establish[ing] Post Offices and post roads.” For most of the nation’s history, the postmaster general was a member of the cabinet, and the first occupant of the office was Benjamin Franklin.
Today, there is no question that the USPS is in a difficult place. With the decline of mail as a medium for communication, the postal service has been losing money hand over fist for years. In fiscal 2024, the USPS lost $9.5 billion. In 2023, it lost $6.5 billion, and in 2016, it lost $5.6 billion.
The abysmal fiscal record of the USPS has only been compounded by absurd spending decisions in recent years, including a multibillion-dollar plan to replace the postal service’s current fleet of gas-powered vehicles with electric vehicles.
This ridiculous spending mandate is only one reason why the USPS loses so much money on an annual basis. However, treating the postal service as a business entity fails to recognize that it is, in fact, not a business but a public service.
The challenge of the postal service is that it must provide mail delivery from the far reaches of Alaska to the most densely populated corners of New York City, all at a minuscule price tag that ensures that any person in the country, regardless of where they live or their annual salary, can have their mail delivered.
Despite its negative spending problems, people like the postal service. A 2024 Pew Research study showed that the USPS enjoys a sky-high 72% approval rating that puts it above NASA. The only agency with a higher approval rating is the National Park Service at 76%
Privatizing the postal service will turn it into a business that cannot run up billion-dollar deficits on an annual basis. This would require the postal service to function in an entirely different manner, which would endanger mail delivery to the far-flung rural communities of the nation that rely on the postal service for packages that companies such as Amazon and UPS deliver with ease in more populated communities.
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At the same time, given the Constitution’s explicit charge to Congress to regulate postal service in the nation, privatization will no doubt raise substantive legal problems that would tie any effort to privatize the USPS to years of costly litigation.
If Trump and his administration want to reform the postal service, that is an endeavor worth pursuing, and ending the costly EV contract is a good start. However, seeking to privatize the agency will invite a cascade of negative feelings toward the administration and would have no guarantee of success. It is not a fight worth having, and Trump should steer as far away from it as possible.