President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering privatizing the United States Postal Service to stop taxpayers from subsidizing its billions of dollars in losses.
Three sources who spoke to the Washington Post under the condition of anonymity reported that during a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce nominee, Trump voiced his interest in an overhaul of the Postal Service.
‘Throwing your money away.’
One source informed the Post that Trump discussed the privatization of the USPS with a group of his presidential transition officials earlier this month.
Trump reportedly pointed to the Postal Service’s massive financial losses, arguing that taxpayers should not have to subsidize the agency.
The president-elect’s Department of Government Efficiency has also reportedly discussed changes to the mail agency.
Economist Casey Mulligan told the Post, “The government is slow, slow, slow — decades slow on adopting new ways of doing things, and there’s a lot of [other] carrier services that became legal in the ’70s that are doing things so much better with increased volumes and reduced costs.”
“We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now,” Mulligan declared.
In fiscal year 2024, the Postal Service lost $9.5 billion, a $3 billion increase from the previous year’s losses. Financial records indicate that the mail agency has nearly $80 billion in liabilities.
Just two years ago, Congress provided a bailout to the USPS amounting to $107 billion.
Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) slammed the Postal Service for spending $10 billion for an electric fleet of delivery trucks.
“The defense contractor was supposed to build 80 a day but has only made 93 in almost two year[s],” Greene wrote in a post on X. “This is a Democrat Green New Deal scam that’s throwing your money away. It has to stop!”
Ahead of the November presidential election, a group of state and local election officials nationwide sent a joint letter to the U.S. Postal Service Postmaster General Louis DeJoy expressing concerns that the mail agency had failed to improve its “pervasive” delivery issues.
Election officials in all 50 states “have raised serious questions about processing facility operations, lost or delayed election mail, and front-line training deficiencies impacting USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner,” the letter read.
The Postal Service has invested in a 10-year modernization plan that it claims has allowed it to reduce 45 million work hours over the past few years and reduce transportation spending by $2 billion.
A spokesperson told the Post, “The United States Postal Service is already engaged in an initiative to ensure that we can provide our customers with a high level of service to every delivery address in the nation at least 6-days-a-week in an efficient and financially sustainable fashion as required by law.”
