When it comes to government agencies which are excellent at wasting taxpayer funds, few outrank the United States Postal Service (USPS) – and President-elect Donald Trump is about to fix that.
A report from the Washington Post suggests that Trump plans to privatize USPS in order to detach it from the federal government.
USPS has been delivering less mail in recent years while losing more money than ever. In fiscal year 2024, the agency lost $9.5 billion worth of taxpayer money.
WaPo reported that Trump met with “a group of transition officials” in order to gather their input on “privatizing the agency.” Among those officials was Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary and the co-chair of his presidential transition team.
In the past, Trump has slammed USPS as being a “joke” and noted that they suffer from all the usual things that plague a government agency including unnecessary bloat and inefficiency.
Casey Mulligan, who served as the chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers during the first Trump term said, “The government is slow, slow, slow — decades slow on adopting new ways of doing things, and there’s a lot of [other] carrier services that became legal in the ’70s that are doing things so much better with increased volumes and reduced costs.”
Mulligan added, “We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now.”
Of course the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, expressed concern regarding the potential impact this would have on e-commerce companies like Amazon who have been taking advantage of USPS’ incompetence to increase their own profits.
But something tells me that Amazon, which posted a $50 billion+ profit in Fiscal Year 2024, will be just fine without relying on a tax-payer funded delivery service to give them absurdly low delivery rates.
Other members of the incoming Trump administration have also expressed a desire to overhaul the wasteful USPS.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy has held “preliminary conversations about major changes to the Postal Service,” according to the outlet and it’s not hard to imagine why.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the incoming chair of the DOGE subcommittee, pointed out one example of the USPS wasting money which saw them cut a check for $10 billion for a fleet of new electric postal trucks.
USPS paid about $166,000 for each new truck, paying for all of them in advance and they were supposed to receive 80 per day. The contractor they hired to build the trucks has only made 93 in TWO YEARS.
Whether its full-on privatization or major reform, the USPS needs some SERIOUS changes because in its current form all it does is waste taxpayer funds in the most egregious ways possible.
