Yves here. This post makes the contention that the long-standing fixation of the conservatives to privatize the Postal Service isn’t merely about privatization in the normal sense. Historically, all but the most extreme anarcho-libertarians conceded the need for a small state, with bridges, roads, defense, and some form of postal service on the list of envisioned services. Keep in mind this effort datees back to well before Amazon was on the replacement contender list, and USPS and Fedex are not powerfully placed players, unlike other beneficiaries of other long-standing privatization (think Wall Street with Social Security, or the health industrial complex with Medicare and the planned kneecapping of Medicaid).
Admittedly, the Postal Service does have high PR value by virtue of its visibility and that is is a universal service. But the notion its unions that a big reason conservatives have been so fiercely devoted to privatizing it does make sense. Cutting budgets so it performs badly promotes both the privatization campaign as well as the demonization of unions. The immediate pretext for privatization is the false claim that the Postal Service is broke is based on bogus accounting for its pension liabilities….and oh, those nasty unions won those pensions.
This is the thing. We don't even have to bail out the USPS. All we have to do, the one and only thing, is to get rid of the insane GOP law requiring it to prefund 75 years worth of pensions for its 650,000 employees.
No other company in the country bears such an onerous burden. https://t.co/Ayo830rqHL
— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) April 12, 2020
By Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible(Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan<. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
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 unionizedfederal 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 firedtens 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.
Just as Thatcher destroyed the mining industry (and many others dependent on it) in the UK to break the National Union of Mineworkers(NUM)
Was backpacking with a retired FedEx executive. They made their money from flying documents back and forth. Compared to packages, documents weighed little and barely took up space. To fulfill the express part of the name, FedEx did the last mile everywhere. Those profits were eaten by electronic delivery and signing.
And speaking of the private corporations, they heavily invested in electric vehicles. USPS is behind here because politics and right wing virtue signaling.
You skip over the very high premium Fedex charges for document delivery, within set and usually urgent time frames.
The right attacks postal services everywhere. They’ve trashed the South African Post Office so badly that all the branches near where I live have been burned down by vagrants inhabiting the abandoned buildings — or perhaps that’s the excuse.
It isn’t just unions. It’s a visceral hatred for anything which might serve the public interest.
Maybe what is needed is a second Great Postal Strike. On that day, the postal workers, especially for less populated regions, can visit their Congress reps and explain to them that this is what postal services would look like if the USPS was privatized. That there would be nothing being delivered to all many of those constituents in their Districts. And all those people would be out for blood and target number one would be for any Congress person that voted for this to happen and whose lives would be made a living hell until the first election that would allow all those people to vote them out of office. It might make them reconsider any vote that they were about to make.
“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.”
Indeed. I realize that the U.S. 4 percent thinks that unions go against nature, and much of the middle / upper middle has fantasies that unions are relics and rubble from the U.S. past. Not so, I’d venture.
I also recall discussing with black colleagues in editorial departments (during my apprenticeship years) how many of their relatives had sought jobs at the post office because the post office was stable employment and didn’t discriminate. Publishing is much less stable, and some of my colleagues were still hearing from their older relatives: “Go get a job at the post office.” So: Don’t rule out race and the treacherous U.S. combo race-class.
I’d also point out that the USPS suffers because the package and special delivery functions were handed over to UPS (United Parcel Service) and Federal Express (especially the function of special delivery). In the case of UPS, which is much older, the relationship is much more complicated. Here’s a bit of history from Wiki entry for United Parcel Service: “The use of a common carrier for delivery between all customers placed UPS in direct competition with USPS, and delivering parcels beyond the California border brought it under the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The first city for UPS to use common carrier status outside California was Chicago, Illinois, in 1953.[14]”
Hmmm. Likewise with Federal Express. Hmmm.
For a long time, Yves Smith and Lambert Strether, in particular, have pointed out that the US post office could do more. After all, establishment of a post office is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, which makes it almost unique among services. Living as I do in the Chocolate City, I avail myself of the Poste Italiane.
Poste Italiane are somewhat peculiar by U.S. standards in that they are a government-supervised service traded as a private company (S.p.A.). Yet the Italian government had the foresight to turn the Poste Italiane into a public face that engages in all kinds of interaction with citizens.
For instance, there is a postal bank in Italy (long advocated by this site), with ATMs usually outside the front door. You can get your pension paid to you through the postal bank.
There are plenty of other services. I can pay my local tassa di rifiuti (trash pick-up tax). I just received a notice from the Agenzia delle Entrate, the Italian IRS, that I owed 25 bucks. Off I went to the post office to pay it.
And as a benefit of Medicare for All with Mental/Dental, you can have what we have in Italy. If I incur medical costs such as for the yearly blood draw at a hospital, I can pay the bill at the Poste Italiane.
So the post office could become part of a deal for Medicare for All. Dream on, Americans.
And the central post office on Via Alfieri in the Chocolate City is a grand building, late 1800s, influenced by the Liberty Style so prevalent here. The clerks in the Filatelia section think that I should have groovy stamps, and they usually sell me an array celebrating historical events or pleasing the visual field.
Here are some headers plus the first paragraph from the Wiki entry in Italian for the Poste Italiane: You can see how many different kinds of services that Poste Italiane are involved in. (At least the U.S. post office is allowed to take applications for passports, but that is the minimum.)
Poste Italiane
Sede principale Roma
Ministero dell’economia e delle finanze (Azionista di controllo)
Poste Italiane, nota anche attraverso la sigla PT (corrispondente alla locuzione Poste e Telegrafi poi Poste e Telecomunicazioni[4]), è un’impresa pubblica e holding italiana, sotto forma di società per azioni, controllata dal Ministero dell’economia e delle finanze, attiva anche attraverso società controllate nei settori logistico-postale, assicurativo, finanziario (tramite il Patrimonio BancoPosta), nei servizi di monetica, telecomunicazioni, telegrafici e di telematica pubblica, nonché recentemente nel settore immobiliare, dell’energia (Luce e Gas), operazioni di riscossione e di raccolta del risparmio postale emesso da Cassa Depositi e Prestiti e assistita dalla garanzia dello Stato Italiano
A translation courtesy of Yandex Translate-
‘Headquarters Rome
Ministry of Economy and Finance (Controlling Shareholder)
Poste Italiane, also known through the abbreviation PT (corresponding to the term Poste e Telegrafi then Poste e Telecomunicazioni[4]), is an Italian public company and holding company, in the form of a joint-stock company, controlled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, also active through subsidiaries in the logistics-postal, insurance, financial sectors (through the BancoPosta Heritage), in monetics, telecommunications, telegraphic and public telematics services, as well as recently in the real estate, energy (Light and Gas)sector, collection and collection of postal savings issued by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and assisted by the Italian State guarantee’
What will be the quid pro quo for the destruction of the postal service? To whom will it be paid? For some this is about anarcho-libertarian nonsense, but I think stupidity and greed play the largest roles.
“Neither rain nor snow nor dead of night shall keep this messenger from his appointed round” refers to the Chapars who were the postal riders of the Achaemenid-Persian Empire’s postal system, the Angarium. It was founded in the sixth century bc by Cyrus the Great and expanded and refined by Darius the Great who built the 2,500 kilometer well maintained great road connecting many of the major cities of the empire. It was described by Herodotus. The system was based on a series of stations, Chapar-Kahaneli, at standard intervals between which the relay riding Chapars rode. The Chapars enjoyed high status unlike our current postal workers. Messages could be delivered between 7-10 days across the empire. The communications and well-kept roads facilitated commerce and cultural exchange. The system is well described by several detailed items available with a Google type search. I appreciate our post office’s providing a reduced that allows me to share books with friends.
The Republicans only go after the unions that don’t agree with them. They will carve out exceptions for Police and Fire unions, but the UFT, the SEIU, and the other Democratic supporting unions must be attacked.
It’s hypocrisy and pure politics for them.
did i miss the part in this article letting me know what steps the dems were taking to protect the post office & its solid union jobs?
I’m sure the Dems are “fighting” for it…
I’m looking forward to performative speeches, tweets, and if we’re really lucky maybe a trip by some representative you’ve never heard of to visit a rural post office.
No, but did you happen to miss that the Democratic Party and its accepted elected officials are for the most part from and represent the Right. Once you accept that our bipartisan country is actually uniparty you read headlines like for this post and know that even if it isn’t mentioned there will be no real opposition from the faux Left party.
Because of advancing age I’m selling off my physical music selection. One by one or local mailboxes have been removed or modified so they will not accept an LP packed in corrugated cardboard. There used to be three within walking distance of my place in Redmond, WA. There is now one, and it has had a metal plate bolted to it’s slot, which will now only fit items less than 6mm thick and 250mm wide.
Thank the Unibomber for that one.
I realize that this is probably an off the wall view, but I think that part of the reason that the ‘Right’ hates the Post Office and has worked for years to kill it is that it actually proves that privatization is not better or cheaper. The same can be said of Medicare. In both cases, most of the things that hamper their operations are road blocks faced by no private business, see the pension funding demand and the refusal to provide relief during Covid for the Post Office and the legal impediments to using its size and power to negotiate for Medicare (Medicare Advantage plans which are intrinsically more expensive for the government are allowed more leeway.)
Not wanting to rip off the customer is something that most of our Oligarchs and wannabe Oligarchs not only do not understand but actively despise. Add being of service to those least valuable to the business and you have something they want not only to destroy but to kill it with fire so it does not return.
Ah, that is an astute point!
It aligns with a posting/twitter from a now departed director at IRA that oversaw the development of a platform allowing individuals to file taxes online, for free… Which now has been shut down by DOGE.
I would also add that what makes the USPS (and social security, medicare, medicaid, and education) especially attractive for privatization is that these are all monopolies, built by the federal government, that will be discontinued and for all intents and purposes handed over to politically connected private interests for a fraction of their real economic value.
A monopoly has all kinds of economic power, including the ability to dictate the terms of the agreement, market segment by market segment, which allows them to screw the customers they don’t value. Further, the sheer size of the USPS in private hands gives it a monopsonystic market power to destroy the union and significantly restrict employee compensation, as well as the compensation they pay to suppliers.
It’s not, IMO, that private business couldn’t do what the USPS does better and more cost efficiently. It’s that even if they do, the benefits go to the select few who control the entity. You put this kind of monopolistic / monopsonystic power in private hands, and all customers, employees and suppliers, who have nowhere near the same level of economic power, will be exploited. What could be a better and cheaper vehicle inevitably becomes a vehicle for exploitation. Customers, employees and suppliers all pay the significant price for the huge economic rents taken by the select few.
In my benighted libertarian past the existence of the post office was always that thing lingering in the corner of my mind and demanding I answer the evergreen question “is that really the case?” vis a vis the efficiency of the private sector.
Case in point: UPS was supposed to deliver a new smartphone at our home. The POORLY paid UPS driver, apparently knocked on the door. I was upstairs vacuuming & couldn’t hear him.
Today, someone else is supposedly coming again. Just in case, that driver spends 20 seconds to have me answer the doorbell, I placed a huge Poster on the door:
WAIT! I’m here!! Give me 30 seconds to answer the door. As for you poorly paid folks, we strongly recommend you form A UNION. We feel sorry for your poor wages.
Thanks!
UPS is strongly unionized.
Businesses that do monthly billing or send out periodic statements or reports seem most anxious to press people into signing up for paperless delivery of statement or reports, and electronic-billing. I believe a part of efforts to cripple the US Postal Service mail delivery is related to this desire.