In mid-March, the Postmaster General told Congress that the United States Postal Service would be unable to deliver mail within twelve months unless Congress lifted its debt limit. Shortly thereafter, in response to rising energy prices following the US war on Iran, USPS announced a fuel surcharge on packages, a first ever in its fifty-five year history as a government corporation. Around the same time, Amazon presented USPS with the double insult of cutting its contract (USPS’s largest) by 20 percent and, according to the logistics consulting and analytics firm ShipMatrix, surpassing it in parcel volume.
The clouds on the horizon for USPS have coincided with the revival of proposals for postal privatization, long a dream of conservatives and neoliberals. In 2018, the first Trump administration called for privatization of the USPS, and in 2019 the Treasury Department attempted to assume control of USPS business decisions. But with the second term the threat has become more concrete. Even before the inauguration, in December 2024 the president-elect reiterated that the agency was on the proverbial chopping block. “We didn’t finish the job in the first term,” Carey Mulligan, the chief economist of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the first Trump administration, said at the time, “but we should finish it now.” In February 2025, Wells Fargo’s Equity Research team, an arm of its investment banking business, answered the call by publishing a “framework” for postal privatization, further whetting the private sector’s appetite.
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