Christie Zizo, Digital Editor
Published:
Christie Zizo, Digital Editor
ORLANDO, Fla. – Postal workers across the country will rally outside post offices on Sunday, nearly a month after President Donald Trump suggested he may try to take control of the independent agency and put it under the Commerce Department.
No official plans have been announced, but the National Association of Letter Carriers, the union that represents hundreds of thousands of postal workers, wants to make it clear that they would fight any attempt to do so.
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Rallies are planned outside several post offices in Orange, Brevard and Volusia counties Sunday afternoon.
“We oppose any plans to eliminate the USPS leadership, abolish regulatory oversight, and carve up postal operations, thereby threatening the universal mandate to deliver everywhere and for the same price regardless of Zip Code,” the NALC said in a news release.
Last month during the swearing-in ceremony for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump said he was considering the move because the postal service had been a “tremendous loser for this country, tremendous amounts of money that they’ve lost.”
“And it’ll be a form of a merger, but it’ll remain the Postal Service, and I think it’ll operate a lot better,” the president said.
The 250-year-old U.S. Postal Service has been an independent, self-financing agency since 1970. The bulk of the postal service’s $78.5 billion budget comes from customer fees, everything from stamps to post office box rentals.
Congress only allocates about $50 million a year to subsidize free and reduced-cost mail services.
But the Postal Service has struggled with huge losses ever since Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. Among other things, the law requires USPS to pre-fund employee retirement costs 75 years ahead, costing the agency some $72 billion.
Last fiscal year, the USPS reported total operating revenue was $79.5 billion, an increase of $1.4 billion from the previous year. That was despite a nearly 4% drop in first-class mail volume.
However, the agency still had a net loss of $9.5 billion, in part because of the 2006 retirement funding mandate, along with inflation adjustments for workers’ compensation payments.
Louis DeJoy, the retiring head of the Postal Service, who was appointed by Trump in 2020 during his first term in office, implemented a 10-year plan in 2021 to make the agency self-sustaining. That plan included raising prices, consolidating facilities and slowing down mail delivery.
This is not the first time the president has talked about privatizing postal services. In 2018 he created a task force to look into the concept.
The task force concluded that privatizing the postal service would allow the agency to better adapt to customer needs and be able to tap into private markets to fund operational improvements.
However, that likely would mean things like ending daily delivery to individual homes, reduced services for rural areas, and reducing staffing levels, along with pay and benefits.
Attempts to implement those recommendations faced Congressional opposition.
The postal service would not be easy to spin off from government control, however.
For one thing, postal services are recognized in the U.S. Constitution and explicitly mentioned under Article I, Section 8.
The document grants Congress the “sole and exclusive” power to establish post offices and post roads (postal routes).
The Post Office Act of 1792 established the agency as a permanent government institution. The U.S. Postal Service sees universal service to every American, regardless of where they live, as a mandate.
So any major changes to the postal service should require an act of Congress.
However, the Trump administration has already moved to dismantle or remake other Congressionally established agencies, like the U.S. Department of Education, via executive order.
Earlier this month, DeJoy entered into an agreement to allow the Department of Government Efficiency to help with identifying inefficiencies and fixing issues.
In a letter to Congress, DeJoy listed out some of the issues he believed DOGE could help identify and fix, including retirement funding.
The NALC says it agrees there are issues and welcomes anyone willing to get Congress to deal with those issues, particularly with regard to pension management.
“If DOGE wants to improve the Postal Service’s finances, the above actions will do just that. Misguided ideas like privatization will not. Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees’ jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily,” said a statement by NALC president Brian L. Renfroe released on March 13.
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Christie joined the ClickOrlando team in November 2021.
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