President Donald Trump is making plans to gut the United States Postal Service and absorb the agency into his administration, according to several sources who spoke with The Washington Post.
According to the Post, which cited six people familiar with the administration’s plans, Trump could sign an executive order “as soon as this week” that would dissolve the USPS’s governing board and absorb the independent agency into the Department of Commerce, which is run by Trump appointee Howard Lutnick. Of course, it’s not clear that Trump has the power to do this; several postal experts told the Post that this move, if enacted, would likely run afoul of federal law.
After the story dropped, a White House official told CNN that Trump had no plans to sign such an order.
“No such EO (executive order) is in the works, and Secretary Lutnick is not pushing for such an EO,” the official said.
But the Post isn’t the only outlet reporting the Trump administration’s next possible steps. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal also noted the plans to dissolve the board, citing two government officials.
The rumors swirling around the Postal Service revive questions about its future. After all, earlier this week, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy (another Trump appointee) also announced plans to step down midway through his 10-year term.
Even if a White House official denied the reports, their word should be taken with a healthy grain of salt considering Trump is a known liar. And even if his administration doesn’t dissolve the governing board and fold the USPS into the Commerce Department, it could still move to privatize the service, an idea that Trump has supported since at least 2018.
Either way, the postal service’s governing board is taking the threat of Trump interference seriously enough that its members held an emergency meeting on Thursday where, according to the Washington Post, they hired outside legal counsel and instructed lawyers to sue the White House if any board members are removed.
Notably, two of the group’s Republican members—Republican National Committee Chair Mike Duncan and former Trump administration official Derek Kan—were conspicuously absent during the meeting and did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
Trump has a longstanding feud with the USPS, the national postal carrier that was founded in 1775. During his first term, Trump attempted to undermine the agency by opposing funding. That was his attempt to make it harder to vote by mail, a practice he worried would cost him the 2020 election.
“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an August 2020 interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
More recently, in December, Trump floated the idea of full-blown privatization of the USPS, which the president of the American Postal Workers Union warned would “end universal service.” Indeed, privatizing the service could reshape the way Americans receive deliveries, as current federal law requires the USPS to deliver to all addresses, even in hard-to-reach locations. The agency operates under a “universal service obligation,” meaning that the mail they’re responsible for gets delivered regardless of cost or distance.
On Thursday, the American Postal Workers Union said that any plan for Trump to absorb the USPS into his control “would be an outrageous, unlawful attack on a storied national treasure, enshrined in the Constitution and created by Congress to serve every American home and business equally.”
Despite ongoing financial hardships and the fact that on-time delivery has struggled under DeJoy’s watch, Americans still love the country’s public mail system. In fact, according to an August 2024 survey from Pew Research Center, the USPS holds a 72% favorability rating, only second to the National Park Service (which Trump is also trying to destroy).
It’s true, though, that the USPS has been hemorrhaging cash for years and faced an uncertain future even before DeJoy announced his retirement. In November, the postmaster warned that there “remain many economic, legislative and regulatory obstacles for us to overcome.”
Meanwhile, as Trump apparently noodles with the two federal agencies Americans love most, he’s also eagerly slashing federal programs that would surely affect poor and working-class citizens—all while boosting his billionaire buddies’ balance sheets.
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