President Donald Trump said he’s looking to change the US Postal service, including giving the Secretary of Commerce authority over what has been an independent organization for more than 50 years. It’s a move that could be a first step towards privatization that could upend how Americans get critical deliveries including online purchases, prescription drugs, checks and vote-by-mail ballots.
The Washington Post first reported late Thursday, citing numerous anonymous sources, that President Donald Trump planned to disband the US Postal Service’s Board of Governors and place the agency under direct control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick. The Wall Street Journal also Friday reported on the plan to dissolve the commission, citing government officials.
Other countries have privatized their postal services in the past. But a plan to privatize the 250-year old service that predates the formation of the United States could dramatically change the way Americans receive deliveries, and even who would be able to get service. Current law requires the USPS to deliver to all addresses, even rural ones that are too costly for a private business to serve profitably. Even many online purchases handled by private companies such as United Parcel Service depend upon the the Postal Service to handle the “last mile” of delivery to homes.
Trump did not immediately announce any moves to disband the board, but at Lutnick’s swearing in ceremony Friday afternoon he confirmed he wants to see changes at the agency, as well as an oversight role for Lutnick.
“Well, we want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money, and we’re thinking about doing that, and it will be a form of a merger,” he said when asked if he wanted to make the USPS as part of the Commerce Department. “It’ll remain the Postal Service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better than it has been over the years.”
Trump acknowledged Lutnick was “going to look at” reforming the Postal Service, citing the Commerce Secretary’s “great business instinct.”
Trump did not say Friday whether he was interested in privatizing the service, which is something that he has voiced support for in the past.
Earlier in the day a White House official told CNN that there would be no executive order disbanding the Board of Governors, which turned out to be true, at least for the time being. But the Post reported that the governing board is taking the threat of it being disbanded seriously enough that it held an emergency meeting Thursday to retain outside counsel with instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency’s independent status.
Trump has already moved to fire other members of governing federal agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, leaving those agencies without the minimum number of members needed to act to provide protections to members of the public.
Trump’s past support for privatization
In December, then President-elect Trump said privatizing the USPS is “not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time,” Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “We’re looking at it.” Trump dropped previous plans to try to privatize the service in 2018 during his first term.
A task force on postal reforms during the first Trump administration argued that the current system is “unsustainable” and that “a private Postal Service with independence from congressional mandates could more flexibly manage the decline of First Class mail while continuing to provided needed services to American communities.”
While the report predicted that a “private operation would be incentivized to innovate and improve services to Americans in every community,” it seemed to signal that the current requirement for universal service to every American address could be lost.
“Major changes are needed in how the Postal Service is financed and the level of service Americans should expect from their universal service operator,” the report argued. “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.”
But it’s unlikely Trump would be able to privatize the agency without Congressional approval, given the many federal laws that control the quasi-independent service. Among those laws is the one requiring universal delivery, as well as one outlawing a strike by USPS employees. With a 630,000-person work force, 91% of whom are covered by union contracts, the USPS is the nation’s largest unionized employers.
Whether those laws would remain in place in a privatized Postal Service is unknown.
One of the service’s major unions, the American Postal Workers Union, issued a statement blasting the idea of disbanding the board of governors or privatization.
“It would be an outrageous, unlawful attack on a storied national treasure, enshrined in the Constitution and created by Congress to serve every American home and business equally,” said the statement from the 200-member union. “Any attack on the Postal Service would be part of the billionaire oligarch coup, directed not just at the postal workers our union represents, but the millions of Americans who rely on the critical public service our members provide every single day.”
A shift in business, billions in losses
The service has been losing money for years, but it recently reported $144 million in net income for the final three months of 2024. It was the first profitable quarter since the April through June period of 2022. It posted a $9.5 billion net loss in the fiscal year ending this past September, up from a loss $6.5 billion the previous year.
The volume of first class mail has been declining for years as people found other ways, including emails, texts an other electronic communications replacing letters, and online payments replacing the sending of checks to pay bills. But the growth of online shopping has resulted in a significant increase in package volumes.
The USPS is among the most popular parts of the federal government, according to a survey of 9,400 Americans by the Pew Research Center last July, which gave it a 72% approval rating, just behind the National Park Service, which was the most popular agency, and just ahead of NASA. Both Democrats and Republicans surveyed were far more positive than negative about the agency.
Despite the denials from the White House that it is not intending to take control of the USPS, opponents of privatization are not assured.
“We remain very concerned,” Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, one of the other major unions representing 200,000 active employees of the service, told CNN Friday. “The destruction of any part of the public service we provide, any path towards privatization is going to have one bottom line result for the customers, it’s going to cost more, and it’s going to take longer to get there.”
Th popularity and approval rate for the postal service is the reason efforts to privatize it failed during the first Trump administration, Renfroe said.
“The people of this country, regardless of their political persuasion, love the postal service,” he told CNN Friday. “Regardless of which way they voted, what they did not vote for was the destruction of the Postal Service.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported which oversight board President Trump is considering disbanding. It is the USPS Board of Governors.
This story has been updated with additional reporting and context.
CNN’s Alayna Treene contributed to this report.
