President Donald Trump is expected to announce plans to take over the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency that has its roots in the U.S. Constitution, and absorb it into the Commerce Department. Congress, not the executive branch, has primary control over the USPS, although the president nominates members of the USPS Board of Governors, who must receive Senate confirmation.
Critics are calling it a “reckless power grab” and warning that it could disenfranchise the millions of Americans — nearly half of all voters — who vote by mail, and threatens to disrupt the lives of millions of Americans, especially seniors, veterans, and rural residents, who receive “about a billion shipments of prescription drugs” through the mail.
According to The Washington Post, which first broke the story, the move “would probably violate federal law,” and throw “the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.”
For decades, Republicans have wanted to privatize the USPS, at one point restructuring it and forcing it to effectively “bank” a continuous 50 years’ worth of pension and health care funding, something no other agency has ever been required to do. Calling the Postal Service “essential,” President Joe Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022—legislation that passed with massive bipartisan support—which eliminated the pre-funding requirement, providing the agency with far greater stabilization.
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President Trump for years has blasted the Postal Service, and weaponized his criticism into attacks on Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, one of his prominent critics. (Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, more recently has appeared to adopt a more supportive tone.) Amazon is one of the top customers of the Postal Service, and Trump tried to force the USPS to increase the rates that the company, one of the nation’s top retailers, has to pay.
Trump in 2018, for example, wrongly claimed that “the Post Office is losing billions of dollars … because it delivers packages for Amazon at a very below cost,” Factcheck.org reported. “He also said taxpayers are ‘subsidizing’ Amazon’s deliveries, but the U.S. Postal Service does not receive any federal funds for its operating costs and hasn’t since 1982.”
The Postal Service’s governing board, “is planning to fight Trump’s order, three of those people told The Washington Post,” the paper reported. “In an emergency meeting Thursday, the board retained outside counsel and gave 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.”
“This is a somewhat regal approach that says the king knows better than his subjects and he will do his best for them. But it also removes any sense that there’s oversight, impartiality and fairness and that some states wouldn’t be treated better than other states or cities better than other cities,” James O’Rourke, who studies the Postal Service at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, told the Post. “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.”
CRITICS RESPOND
Critics immediately blasted President Trump upon hearing news of his plans to take over the Postal Service.
“Now he’ll control mail-in voting. Right out of the autocrat’s playbook,” remarked journalist and author Craig Crawford.
“This is insane,” declared U.S. Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA). “Now Trump wants to seize the Postal Service, dismantle its independence, and throw mail delivery into chaos. This isn’t reform—it’s an incompetent, reckless power grab. We will use every tool at our disposal to fight back.”
“USPS, despite its faults, delivers hundreds of millions of pieces of mail on a *daily* basis, and as a small percentage of that volume, is also the literal backbone of our entire elections, voter registration, and political campaigning system in America,” observed Nick Lima, Registrar/Director of Elections for the City of Cranston, Rhode Island.
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“Taking over the USPS would be plainly contrary to the 1970 Postal Service law. Is the President is betting he can do it and that Congress will do nothing & that maybe the SCOTUS will declare the 1970 statute’s method of appointing the PMG [Postmaster General] unconstitutional?” noted Dr. Kevin R. Kosar, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies the U.S. Congress, the administrative state, American politics, election reform, and the U.S. Postal Service.
“The Postal Service is one of the largest employers of Veterans in the country. Hundreds of thousands of Veterans rely on USPS to deliver medications, benefits, and critical information. We won’t stand by and let this happen. We WILL fight this!” announced the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets.
TRUMP, COVID, AND THE USPS
During the summer of 2020, during President Trump’s first term, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, many more Americans turned to the Postal Service to obtain their prescription medications.
Documenting that phenomenon, Popular Science, citing Michael Pignone, a doctor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas’s Dell Medical School, reported that the USPS is “part of the healthcare system.”
“You can think of the post office as just this incredibly well-distributed last-mile logistics network,” Pignone said. “There are all kinds of possibilities of what the postal service can do.”
WIRED magazine, also in 2020, reported on the ” little-known Postal Plan, which dates back to the Clinton era,” that “charges mail carriers with delivering critical supplies—like vaccines—as a last resort.” It also cited “a little-known Obama administration plan, ‘Executive Order 13527: Medical Countermeasures Following a Biological Attack,'” where “it would fall to the Postal Service to be the first-line responders to a widespread biological terror incident—think an anthrax attack, where the post office shows up at your door with Cipro. Those plans could potentially be dusted off to help respond to disease epidemic or pandemic.”
In its report on Trump’s plans to take over the Postal Service, The Washington nPost also noted that “Republicans have grown wary of [outgoing Postmaster General] DeJoy and the Postal Service’s close ties to the Biden administration. The two partnered to deliver nearly 1 billion coronavirus test kits, the largest expansion of postal capabilities in a generation, and to fund a fleet of more than 60,000 electric mail delivery vehicles, though those were plagued by delivery delays.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump had one of the worst responses compared to other similar nations. He infamously begged officials to slow down testing for the coronavirus, and said, “by having more tests, we have more cases.”
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Image via Reuters