President Donald Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration, potentially throwing the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.
Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to six people familiar with the plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.
Trump’s order to place the Commerce Department in charge of the Postal Service would probably violate federal law, according to postal experts. Another executive order earlier this week instructed independent agencies to align more closely with the White House, though that order is likely to prompt court challenges and the Postal Service by law is generally exempt from executive orders.
“This is a somewhat regal approach that says the king knows better than his subjects and he will do his best for them. But it also removes any sense that there’s oversight, impartiality and fairness and that some states wouldn’t be treated better than other states or cities better than other cities,” said James O’Rourke, who studies the Postal Service at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.”
Americans consistently rank the Postal Service among their most-beloved government agencies, second only to the National Park Service (trump recently fired a ton of National Park Service employees. Just another agency trump wants to destroy).
A 2024 study by the Pew Research Center found more than 70 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the agency, a view that was similar among Democrats and Republicans.
Trump’s first administration sought to test the agency’s independence. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s first-term treasury secretary, attempted to control the 2020 hiring process that brought DeJoy to the Postal Service, and a
task force run out of Mnuchin’s department recommended dramatically shrinking the scope of the agency and preparing it for privatization via an initial public offering.
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump threatened to withhold emergency assistance from the Postal Service unless it quadrupled package prices.
Ahead of the 2020 election, Trump said the Postal Service was incapable of facilitating mail-in voting because the agency could not access the emergency funding he was blocking. The Postal Service ultimately delivered 97.9 percent of ballots from voters to election officials within three days.