The Trump administration’s talk of transforming the U.S. Postal Service has ensnared another one of the country’s oldest institutions — the census.
During a recent interview, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about a potential push for his department to take control of the USPS — even though Congress set up the Postal Service to be independent of the White House and generally self-funded through stamp sales and other service fees.
President Trump gave Lutnick “a whole 24 hours,” the commerce secretary said, to figure out how to solve the mail service’s longstanding financial problems. To “save us money,” the solution Lutnick pitched was to rely on mail carriers instead of hiring temporary census workers to help conduct the constitutionally required head count of the country’s residents once every 10 years.
“Can you imagine saying to your postman, ‘Can you count the people in the house?’ ” said Lutnick, who heads the Census Bureau’s parent agency.
