President Donald Trump has tapped a
former board member of the private mail delivery
corporation FedEx to be the next United States
Postmaster General. David
Steiner’s appointment as head of the public service
agency is a signal that Trump is going to take
another stab at something he tried and failed to
do during his first term: privatize the postal
service.
In February 2025, when Trump said the
USPS is a “tremendous
loser for this country” and that he’s
considering merging it with the Department of
Commerce, he wasn’t echoing a random claim
that came up in conversation with his golf
caddy. During his first
term, Trump appointed a task force to study
the postal service, which concluded the current
system was “unsustainable,” and recommended
privatization in line with the president’s
desire.
Right-wing forces have long had their
sights on the postal service—as they have on
public education, libraries, Social Security,
Medicare, and just about any publicly funded
service—and have carried out an effective
propaganda campaign against USPS’s financial
viability to justify gutting it.
For example, the Heritage Foundation—the
morally bankrupt trafficker of market
fundamentalism and peddler of the Project 2025
blueprint for democratic destruction—has claimed
for years that the nation no longer needs a
postal service. In 2024, it asked if Americans
still needed
their post office. In 2013, it wondered if the postal
service had a future, and in 2010, it contended that postal
workers were paid
too much.
If the Postal Service is truly
financially unsustainable, that has been, in
part, by design. The federal government expects
it to balance its books like any corporation,
but, for years, mandated it pre-fund its workers’
retirements 75 years into the future—a ludicrous
requirement that critics called a “manufactured” crisis. The
mandate was finally overturned in 2022. And,
when most institutions, including private
package delivery companies struggled during
the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump White House refused
to bail out USPS as it did its commercial
counterparts.
But there’s one more aspect to USPS that
makes it a prime right-wing target: it is the largest
unionized federal workforce in the nation,
employing 600,000 people, more than 90 percent
of whom are members of various unions. Under the
oversight of his billionaire buddy Elon Musk,
Trump has fired tens
of thousands of government workers, as part of his overt plan to run the
government “like
a business.” Musk and Trump are presumably
salivating at the prospect of dismissing
unionized postal workers. It’s no wonder Don
Maston, the president of the National Rural
Letter Carriers’ Association, warned in late
April 2025, “the
hounds are at the door.”
The American
Postal Workers Union (APWU), which represents about
200,000 postal workers, has also issued a
serious warning about Trump’s intentions. It
recently debunked several conservative claims about
the agency’s financial viability and explained
that “[t]his administration intends to break up
and sell off the profitable portions of the
Postal Service to billionaires and USPS
competitors.”
It’s precisely because most postal
workers are unionized that they enjoy decent
wages and benefits—as all Americans deserve, and
as most non-union blue-collar employees of
private companies don’t get. Postal workers, who
are currently in the midst
of negotiating union contracts, have historically
fought hard for their rights. The Great
Postal Strike of 1970 paved the way for the Postal
Reorganization Act, which President Richard Nixon signed
into law later that year. That bill allowed
postal workers the right to union representation
and to get raises, and cleaved off the postal
service as an independent agency.
It’s true that the modern-day transition
to electronic bill payments and digitized news
media is rendering a large percentage of USPS’s
delivery services obsolete. But there are
crucial things that can’t be delivered
electronically or are extremely difficult to
pick up in person, namely, prescription
medications and vote-by-mail
ballots for elderly and disabled Americans.
FedEx—one of USPS’s prime private competitors—is
more
expensive than USPS for letter-sized and
small packages, which is why your neighborhood
postal worker is more likely to deliver meds and
ballots to your grandparents on time.
Trump, Musk, the Heritage Foundation, and
their ilk routinely claim private corporations
are more cost-efficient and deliver greater
value than publicly funded services. Precisely
the opposite is true. Not only is FedEx
operating with a net
debt of more than $14 billion, it doesn’t deem delivery
to remote rural areas profitable enough, relying
instead on USPS to pick up the slack. It takes
hubris to claim up is down and black is white,
but hubris is what purveyors of predatory
capitalism have in spades.
Much of Congress realizes the postal
service’s worth. The only reason Trump was
unable to succeed in his plan to privatize USPS
during his first term was bipartisan
congressional opposition. This time around, the same dynamic is
shaping up, with U.S. House
Representatives introducing legislation to protect
the postal service in January 2025, and senators taking a similar step in late
March.
In recent years, proponents of the USPS
have been pushing to expand the agency’s purview
by incorporating public banking as one of its
services. The Save
the Post Office coalition, formed in the wake of Trump appointing
Louis
DeJoy as the postmaster general, laid out
in
great detail how millions of “unbanked”
Americans would benefit from a public banking
service that the USPS is well-poised to offer.
The right wants to gut the Postal Service
precisely because it operates on a model of
government serving the collective good, charging
the same rate to all Americans, and giving them
the same service regardless of location, even
though it costs more to deliver mail to isolated
rural communities than well-connected urban
ones. This is a form of equity—ensuring that those
who have the least are subsidized by the rest
of us—and we all know how much conservatives
hate that word.
It’s also the same concept that publicly
funded health care is based on: everyone pays
the same amount and each person draws according
to their need, with younger, healthier Americans
subsidizing the care of older, sicker people,
and no corporate executives sucking out profits
like leeches on skin.
The reason we still don’t have such a
health system is essentially because the leeches
don’t want to give up their unearned booty.
Instead, they craft
laughable propaganda about public services shaping the
character of Americans to become soft, as though
reliance on one another was a moral failing.
This
commentary was produced by Economy
for All, a project of
the Independent Media Institute.
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