President Donald Trump is taking aim at the US Postal Service.
According to a Thursday report from the Washington Post‘s Jacob Bogage, the president plans to fire the members of USPS’ board and hand the keys to the agency over to the Department of Commerce.
Trump plans to make the move through executive order as early as this week, the Post reports. The board reportedly intends to take the administration to court if Trump carries out the firings or tries to take control, with postal experts telling the Washington Post that absorbing the independent agency would likely violate federal law. A White House spokesperson later denied the report.
After his re-election, Trump discussed privatizing the Postal Service with Howard Lutnick—later confirmed as Commerce Secretary—at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a separate Post article from December.
But Trump’s new target is actually an old one. During his first term, the White House pushed to break up and sell off the Post Office—one of the most favorably viewed government agencies—in a 2018 plan: “A privatized Postal Service would,” among other things, “make business decisions free from political interference.”
On February 20, Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees, issued a statement calling Trump’s reported plan an “unlawful attack” that was “part of the billionaire oligarch coup.” The move would increase costs and threaten the livelihoods of more than 7 million workers, Dimondstein said.
“Call your senator,” the union posted on X on Friday. “Urge them to block this unconstitutional takeover and ensure the Postal Service remains independent and in the hands of the people!”
I previously spoke with Dimondstein about the threat Trump and DOGE present to the Postal Service. People who rely on USPS for essentials like medicine could be particularly at risk if the agency is privatized or loses its political independence, Dimondstein told me. Instead of privatizing the USPS, Dimondstein thinks the government should consider expanding it, pointing to opportunities for offering financial services for tens of millions of Americans with low incomes who are unbanked or underbanked—long a norm in many other countries. According to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization, USPS is an “equalizer institution” that could allow access to free or low-fee bank accounts, as well as loan and check cashing services. USPS also provides outsized job opportunities for women, Black workers, other workers of color, and veterans, he said.
Then there’s the role USPS plays in elections. As my colleague Pema Levy pointed out at the time, Democrats wanted to increase funding for the service prior to the 2020 election, to help deliver mail-in ballots at the height of the Covid pandemic—but Republicans dissented.
Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general of the USPS and a Trump donor who earlier this week announced plans to step down, caused an uproar during that time. DeJoy made significant changes just before the 2020 vote, including scaling back the number of mail sorting machines and limiting the ability of workers to make additional postal trips where they would draw overtime. Critics said that those decisions restricted the agency’s ability to serve mail-in voters during the pandemic—something that disproportionately hurt Democrats (according to the Elections Performance Index, 58 percent of Democrats voted by mail, while only 29 percent of Republicans did so in 2020).
Despite the postal service’s mandate to exist independently—passed by Congress and signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970—the agency may, if Trump can override Congress, become one more brick in the wall of expanded executive power.