After the postmaster general, Louis Dejoy, a former Trump fundraiser and logistics executive appointed during the president’s first term, announced last month that he was stepping down, defenders of the US Postal Service (USPS) concerned that the 249-year-old institution could soon experience the slice and slash of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” scimitar have expressed alarm.
Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to dissolve USPS’s bipartisan board of governors and place the agency under the control of the commerce department secretary, Howard Lutnick, the Washington Post recently reported.
“We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money, and we’re thinking about doing that, and it will be a form of a merger,” Trump said. “It’ll remain the postal service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better than it has been over the years.”
Trump has made no secret of his desire to reform the federal agency, once calling it Amazon’s “delivery boy”. But it employs 637,000 people and 91% of Americans view it favorably, according to a Pew Research survey taken when USPS was perhaps the most visible federal agency during the Covid pandemic and came close to running out of cash entirely.