UPDATE (December 16, 2024, 12:31 p.m. ET): Shortly after this report was published, Donald Trump publicly confirmed that he is, in fact, considering privatizing the U.S. Postal Service.
The United States Constitution doesn’t go into a lot of detail about specific benefits the federal government is supposed to provide to the citizenry — the document tends to rely on generalities such as promoting “the general welfare” — but Article I, Section 8 explicitly authorizes officials to “establish post offices.”
In other words, as long as there’s been a United States government, a domestic mail system has been a pillar of the American experience. There is, however, fresh reason to be concerned about that system’s future. The Washington Post reported:
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.
According to the Post’s reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, the Republican has broached the subject of a Postal Service “overhaul” with several members of his team, including Howard Lutnick, his choice for commerce secretary and the co-chair of his presidential transition.
The article added that Trump has told associates that he does not believe the federal government should subsidize the USPS.
The report comes on the heels of a related piece from Reuters, which noted that the president-elect’s transition team is “considering canceling the United States Postal Service’s contracts to electrify its delivery fleet.”
Such a move would put 1,000 manufacturing jobs in jeopardy, though Trump and his team might very well do it anyway.
If all of this sounds a bit familiar, it’s not your imagination. During the Republican’s first term, he made little effort to hide his hostility toward the USPS, and in the spring of 2020 — as officials scrambled to deal with the intensifying Covid crisis — the then-president made clear he was prepared to reject the entire CARES Act if it included federal funds to rescue the Postal Service.
Asked about his apparent USPS disdain during a White House press briefing, Trump offered a long, meandering, hard-to-follow diatribe, in which he seemed to argue that USPS finances would be fine if it simply imposed higher rates on Amazon.com (a company Trump disliked because its owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Washington Post, which he also disliked). His complaints were quickly discredited, though his scorn for the Postal Service apparently lingers. In theory, it’s easy to imagine members of Congress having a problem with privatization plans, but in practice, let’s not forget that many congressional Republicans are on record supporting privatizing the USPS out of existence. In other words, if Trump is serious about such a plan, he might not face too much resistance on Capitol Hill, at least among GOP officials. Should such a gambit come to fruition, I suspect a whole lot of Americans will say they didn’t know they were voting for such a plan when they backed Republican candidates in the 2024 elections, but they might very well end up with a dramatic shift anyway. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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