The Mail Must Get Through, DOGE? “Hell No!”

WASHINGTON (03-25) – This July the US Postal Service (USPS) will celebrate its 250th anniversary making it older than the country. Once again it is facing a call for privatization, this time from President Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE. Love it or hate it, the USPS has become a regular part of Americans’ everyday lives six days a week making its daily rounds delivering wanted and unwanted mail to practically every person in the country. Rural deliver is one of the hallmarks of the service that allows for all Americans to have equal access to this most important means of communication and commerce.

The USPS employs 650,000 people and delivers 381 million pieces of mail to 169 million customers at their homes, offices and businesses everyday across the vast nation accounting for 44 percent of the world’s delivered mail. Of all federal agencies, the USPS is held in high regard by the public it serves.

In re-defining the British colonial mail service in 1775, Ben Franklin established the Post Office Department and became its first Postmaster General. In 1792, George Washington signed the Congressional “Act to establish the Post Office and Post Roads within the United States,” officially creating this vitally important service embodied in the U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 8 known as the “Postal Clause or the Postal Power.” Neither Trump, DOGE, nor Elon Musk can change that mandate without having the approval of Congress. Although as witnessed recently, Musk and Trump may both disregard that “minor detail” with their desire to privatize the system.

One hallmark since its founding is that the service has met its daily rural delivery mail program no matter the location or other conditions in meeting that goal. The oft heard credo, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” while noble in intent, as a practical matter the service has and does suspend delivery from time to time under extreme conditions to assure the health and safety of its workers and staff. But in the end, they get the job done.

In 1971, the service was transformed by Congress through the Postal Reorganization Act into an independent agency within the executive branch and renamed the United States Postal Service. The service is governed by an 11–person Board of Governors of which nine members are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate to serve six-year terms. The Postal Service does not receive any taxpayer funds for its operations, instead relying on revenue generated from stamp sales and other service fees.

A separate Postal Regulatory Commission with five members appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate oversees the USPS, including the rates it charges for stamps and services. The massive decrease in mail volume since 2000 due to the use of email, social media, texts and alternative delivery services, during the fiscal year 2018 saw the service lose $8.8 billion on an operating revenue of $71.1 billion.

The matter of transferring the USPS to the Commerce Department as Trump would like to see or for Musk’s desire to privatize USPS was the subject of a Headliners event at the National Press Club Headliners Newsmaker discussion that covered the future of the service along with “what proposed changes would mean for the price of stamps and packages, the frequency of mail delivery and other issues vital to providing postal service.”

The proposed sale to a private corporation would impact many of the services customers have long grown used to and expect and could include fewer delivery days each week and limited delivery areas that are not profitable.

American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein held up a memo from Wells Fargo Bank that delineated a proposed postal service that keeps the mail service as a taxpayer-funded government entity while the highly profitable package and parcel delivery service, are “sold or IPOed,” essentially making rich investors a handsome profit. In so doing, the “USPS would need to raise prices by 30-140% across its product line.”

It shouldn’t be lost on anyone either that the Wells Fargo proposal highlights the fact that the USPS owns $85 billion in real estate across the country which is a rich plum to exploit for profit.

The breaking news of the day was that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, appointed by Trump in 2020, resigned his position yesterday allowing for the selection of a new Postmaster General. Oddly too, the resignation took place shortly after DeJoy had asked DOGE to help identify cost savings the service might consider employing. Dimondstein opined that he believes DeJoy, not a supporter of privatization, was “pushed out” in an effort to butress support for privatization.

One downside of privatization is the negative impact it would have on rural delivery as iterated by National Association of Rural Letter Carriers President Donald Maston, who stated that rural customers would be left behind as that service is not as profitable to operate.

When asked about privatization, National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian Renfroe gave the simple answer of “Hell no!” He noted that the negative impact would severely affect the 129,000 rural mail carriers who drive 3.7 million miles each day in serving 51 million rural customers.

The panelists were all in agreement that the move to privatize was clearly a struggle between “Wall Street and Main Street.” In an effort to keep the service in the federal government, Donald Maston referred to H.R. 70 which, if passed would keep USPS “an independent establishment of the Federal Government…not subject to privatization.”

In speaking about post office closures, Refroe said that while some are profitable and others not, the service maintains all of them as a service to their customers and that the aggregate revenues generated amortizes the costs of those which are less profitable. Under a privatization scheme, those which are not profitable would be closed. The difference being that the U.S. Postal Service is a Service and not the “U.S. Postal Business.”

Addressing the massive retirement obligation of the USPS, Renfroe said that presently the service can only invest retirement monies in U.S. Treasury bonds and that a “legislative priority” would be for Congress to allow the service to develop investment strategies to maximize greater profit through a structured approach of low-risk investments like other retirement funds.

He went further in suggesting that, while reform is needed, new revenue streams should also be introduced such as postal banking, administrating the U.S. Census, being the intake for TSA revenue-related applications, fishing and hunting license, and DOD dirty bomb detectors.

One focus of the discussion was the presence of two postal workers who told of the importance of rural post offices, rural deliver and urban customers being able to interface with their local post office. While the settings are widely different, it was apparent through their testimony how vital a post office is to a community and as a lifeline to those it serves.

In closing, everyone was reminded to remain vigilant and that we did not vote to destroy the post office, “We the People Own the Post Office.”

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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