Donald Trump has never liked the U.S. Postal Service. Even by Trump’s standards, his explanations for this hatred range wildly: He complained about the Postal Service’s contracts with Amazon (and its founder, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos), its imaginary role in imaginary mail-in voter fraud and even just the Postal Service being “a loser.” His first term featured frequent griping, efforts to undermine its work and threats to its funding. Now, as he prepares to begin his second term, Trump is thinking about privatizing the post office altogether.
If that happened, it would be a disaster for the country. And it would hit rural voters — who overwhelmingly supported Trump in all three of his elections — harder than anyone.
The Postal Service connects Americans to each other, binding us together as one nation.
On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that Trump was holding talks with advisers at Mar-a-Lago to discuss postal privatization. Asked about it at a Monday news conference, Trump called privatization “not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” adding, “It’s an idea that a lot of people have talked about for a long time; we’re looking at it.” As Casey Mulligan, one of Trump’s top economic advisers in his first term, told the Post, “We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now.”
Admittedly, privatization may not be “the worst idea” Trump has ever heard — but only because that is a very low bar. In fact, privatization is a terrible idea in almost every way you could imagine.
To start, the chief critique Republicans aim at the Postal Service — that it runs a deficit every year and therefore is failing — is completely misleading. The Postal Service is structured differently than most federal departments; it has more independence and funds itself to a large degree by charging for services. For this reason, Postal Service critics frequently complain that the agency is “losing money.” But the Postal Service is still a government department, like the Defense Department and Agriculture Department. We accept that operating those agencies costs money, because we believe the country should have a military and monitor crop yields. And it should give health coverage to veterans, and maintain highways, and have courts, and do a thousand other things, too. That’s why we pay taxes.
Many of the fiscal challenges the Postal Service faces are a result of the things it does that a profit-seeking private business would never do. If the post office were privatized, it would probably start charging more — a lot more — for the services it now provides for a pittance. For instance, sending a letter from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles with FedEx will run you about $50 at a minimum; from the post office, it’s just 73 cents. Even with recent increases, we have some of the lowest postal rates in the world (sending a letter in Denmark will set you back 29 kroner, or over $4).
And just like FedEx, a private postal service would probably charge different rates depending on where you send your letter — meaning it would discard one of the foundations of our postal system. It’s fundamental to how we think of mail service that every American can send mail to every other American at the same rate, whether you’re sending a letter to the other side of town or from Apalachicola, Florida, to Alakanuk, Alaska. The Postal Service connects Americans to each other, binding us together as one nation.
No one gets a better deal from the Postal Service than rural Americans.
That’s not just my poetic gloss on the USPS; it’s written into law. Title 39 of the U.S. Code states, “The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.”
In keeping with that mandate, the USPS maintains over 30,000 post offices, many of which are not economically advantageous. It does so precisely because its mission is not to make money, but to serve all Americans wherever they live, no matter how sparsely populated. According to the Post Office inspector general, 57% of post offices are in rural areas, serving just 16% of Americans. Of those post offices, nearly two-thirds “cost more to run than the revenue they bring in” — compared with just 7% of offices in urban areas. If we shut down every outpost that doesn’t make a profit, thousands of rural post offices would close. In other words, no one gets a better deal from the Postal Service than rural Americans — most of whom have voted emphatically for Trump in three straight presidential elections. Bringing mail to rural areas is the least cost-effective part of what the USPS does. Commercial carriers such as UPS and FedEx won’t even bother delivering to many rural addresses; it just doesn’t make economic sense to drive miles and miles to deliver a single package. If you use one of those carriers to send something to a rural address, they’ll often just give your package to — you guessed it — the post office. An unkind liberal might say, “Go ahead then — privatize the Postal Service. We here in the cities and suburbs will be fine. It’s the rural voters who backed Trump who’ll lose out.” But liberals aren’t saying that, and not just because there are millions of rural voters who didn’t back Trump. It’s because we believe in certain fundamental principles, including the one that says all Americans, wherever they live and whoever they are, deserve to be served by their government. For all its problems, the USPS is a national treasure. It delivers billions of pieces of mail quickly and affordably. It has long provided an avenue for secure, middle-class jobs for Black workers, who make up almost a quarter of its employees, and workers without college degrees. In a time of widespread distrust of institutions, the USPS consistently ranks as one of the most popular government agencies; a recent Pew Research Center poll, for instance, found that 72% of Americans had a favorable view of the USPS. Only the National Park Service scored higher. Perhaps that’s the source of Trump’s hostility: In contrast to his claim that our country is a festering hellhole of misery that only he can save, the Postal Service is a government agency that Americans have always loved. It treats us all equally, without a profit motive. Its unionized workforce is more racially diverse than the country as a whole. Its popularity is a reminder that when the government does something important and does it well, Americans don’t want it taken away. So if Trump wants to try to privatize the Postal Service, his foes should welcome the fight.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
