MW What are Trump's USPS plans? He says the Postal Service is a 'tremendous loser' that should 'operate a lot better.'

By Victor Reklaitis

President highlights the Postal Service's big financial losses on Friday after talking about privatization in December

President Donald Trump on Friday said his administration is working on an overhaul of the U.S. Postal Service and indicated that different scenarios were under consideration.

His comments came after multiple published reports late Thursday indicated that an executive order targeting the Postal Service could come as soon as this week that would aim to dissolve the Postal Service's governing board and place the service under the Commerce Department.

The White House said no such order is in the works, adding that Trump's newly confirmed commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, is not pushing for it. Trump later wasn't as dismissive when he was asked about the reports that he's thinking of merging the service with the Commerce Department.

"Well, 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, but it'll remain the Postal Service, and I think it'll operate a lot better than it has been over the years," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon.

"It's been just a tremendous loser for this country - tremendous amounts of money they've lost, and we think we can do something that'll be very good and keep it a very similar way, but whether it's a merger or just using some of the very talented people that we have elsewhere, so it doesn't lose so much," he said.

Trump previously has voiced some support for a shakeup for the Postal Service, saying two months ago that privatization was under consideration.

"Well, there is talk about the Postal Service being taken private. You do know that. Not the worst idea I've ever heard. It really isn't. You know, it's a lot different today with - between Amazon $(AMZN)$ and UPS $(UPS)$ and FedEx $(FDX)$ and all the things that you didn't have. But there is talk about that. It's an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time," Trump told reporters in December, a month before his inauguration. "We're looking at it."

Trump administration officials called for privatization of the Postal Service during his first presidency, and Trump himself often criticized the service during his first term.

Critics of privatization have said such a move is likely to increase the amount people pay to mail letters and packages and lead to closures of post offices, especially in rural areas where the cost of running a post office often exceeds its revenue.

The Postal Service reported a "controllable loss" for its 2024 fiscal year of $1.8 billion, down from $2.2 billion in the prior year. It said the controllable loss excludes certain expenses that are not controllable by management. For fiscal 2025's first quarter, which ended on Dec. 31, the service reported controllable income of $968 million, up from $472 million for the same period a year ago.

The Postal Service said in a statement on Tuesday that its head, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, plans to step down and has notified the agency's board of governors that it's time to find his successor. The statement noted that the agency is going through a 10-year transformation plan, dubbed Delivering for America, in an effort to modernize the postal network, restore long-term financial sustainability and improve service.

The Postal Service, which has more than 600,000 employees, didn't respond to a request for comment Friday. The American Postal Workers Union, which represents more than 200,000 Postal Service employees and retirees, offered criticism and promised resistance.

"Efforts to privatize the Postal Service, in whole or in part, or to strip it of its independence or public service mission, would be of no benefit to the American people," APWU President Mark Dimondstein said in a statement.

"Postal workers and our unions will join with the public to fight for the vibrant, independent, and public Postal Service we all deserve," he said.

The president of another union, Brian Renfroe from the National Association of Letter Carriers, said his group's 280,000 members are "fighting like hell against any privatization efforts or reorganizational mandates."

U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, also expressed outrage over the reports about a Postal Service overhaul, saying in a social-media post that it sounded "brazenly illegal, unconstitutional, and corrupt." Beyer said the U.S. Constitution gives the power to establish the Postal Service to Congress, and the service's "status as an independent agency was also established by Congress in law."

Supporters of privatizing the service have emphasized that European countries including the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands have done exactly that with their postal systems.

"Privatization would give the USPS the flexibility it needs to survive free from congressional micromanagement," Chris Edwards, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said in a December blog post. Edwards wrote on Friday that putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department "would be a mistake, creating an agency even more distant from the entrepreneurial postal system that America needs."

-Victor Reklaitis

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February 21, 2025 17:04 ET (22:04 GMT)

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