New reporting suggests the president-elect has expressed "a keen interest" in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service once he returns to the White House.
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In Trump’s second term, will USPS privatization be on the table?: New reporting suggests the president-elect has expressed "a keen interest" in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service once he returns to the White House
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.[/blockquote]
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......
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.
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