‘We are so unimaginably cooked’: Trump could privatize the USPS
If Donald Trump has his druthers, the USPS is next on the chopping block.
Tump is reportedly planning to privatize the Untied State Postal Service, citing the organization’s financial losses as grounds to do so. According to The Washington Post, Trump has spent time in Mar a Lago meeting with his commerce chair Howard Lutnick to discuss the move – one that if enacted, could mean the loss of jobs for hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
Streamer Hasan Abi summed up the matter succinctly on X: “we are so unbelievably cooked.”
When presented with the USPS’ annual losses, Trump reportedly said that the government should stop privatizing the organization, effectively letting the 53 year old organization die out. While the USPS has only existed for little over half a century in its current form, the United States government has had an organization dedicated to delivering mail since 1775 – with Benjamin Franklin serving as the first ever Postmaster General.
According to Trump administration economist Casey Mulligan, it’s time for a change. “The government is slow, slow, slow—decades slow on adopting new ways of doing things,” said Mulligan, who continued that since the 1970’s there have been other mail-carrying organizations “doing things so much better with increased volumes and reduced costs.” Mulligan concluded that while he and the Trump administration were not able to “finish the job” in dismantling the USPS during Trump’s first term, he believes that the president-elect should “do it now.”
The idea of federal cost cutting has been a mainstay of Trump’s upcoming administration. Trump has selected Space X CEO Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to head The Department of Government Efficiency, a not yet official agency dedicated to cost cutting and named after an internet meme. According to Musk, he is spending the holiday season putting together a “naughty” and “nice” list of federal workers, who he intends to hire and fire based on whether or not they are loyal to the incoming administration’s goals. Musk’s efforts are part of a larger goal to cut over $2 trillion from federal spending, a move that could devastate Social Security and healthcare for millions and millions of Americans.
While Trump and his allies consider privatizing the USPS, private businesses depend on the agency already. E-commerce giant Amazon is a chief customer of the United States, and the company relies on the government agency in order to make “last-mile” deliveries to customers who live in remote and rural areas. Amazon takes advantage of the USPS’ “universal service obligation” which requires the agency to complete all deliveries regardless of whether or not it is profitable to do so – allowing Amazon to profit off of deliveries without over-expending resources to deliver to the furthest reaches of America.
The denizens of those far-flung frontiers may doom Trump’s privatization efforts completely. Republican officials from Alaska frequently invite postal executives to the remote state in order to demonstrate how its economy largely depends the USPS to deliver mail to across the rugged wilderness. Politicians who represent America’s other remote areas will likely respond against the privatization effort with similar pushback.
Despite the importance of the United States Postal Service, Trump has made his contempt of the organization clear. Trump has derided the organization in the past, calling it the “delivery boy” of Amazon. Though Trump may not care about USPS, many Americans in depend on it, and should Trump successfully privatize the post, rural citizens may be “cooked” indeed.
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
