The Save the Post Office Coalition warns of stealth privatization in the New Year
By: Annie Norman
It’s the busiest time of year for the Postal Service. During the holiday season, postal workers move over approximately 15 billion pieces of mail and packages and handle more than 400 million packages every single week. There’s even an official USPS Holiday Newsroom website with a real time mail and package counter.
USPS’ official motto is “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” will stop the Postal Service, but this year especially, they’ve also delivered through historic heat waves, job cuts, service slowdowns, and a serious, unprecedented assault led by Donald Trump, who wants to privatize the post office, calling it a “tremendous loser” as he attempted (and failed) to shove the independent agency under the control of the Commerce Department and fire the board of governors in his first 100 days back in office.
U.S. MAIL NOT FOR SALE
When news of Trump’s hostile takeover plans were leaked to the press earlier this year, our coalition joined the postal workers unions and sprang to action. As a result, more than 150 cities saw over 500 rallies across three days as organized postal workers and communities stood up to fight back against a privatization attack on the Postal Service unfolding in real time.
During this time there was also a leaked Wells Fargo analyst memo all but laying out a step-by-step guide to privatization, suggesting that Wall Street is salivating at the thought of getting their hands on USPS. Trump would love nothing more than to convert a universal and affordable public service to the people into a profit machine for corporations to extract from the rest of us. Indeed, Trump spent this entire year attempting to weaken public sector institutions, attacking federal workers, and using federal law enforcement, including postal inspectors, to unleash terror on our communities, targeting immigrants and people of color in illegal deportations, arrests, and surveillance. He’s interfered with USPS leadership, threatened mergers, pushed privatization, and cheered on job cuts. And despite having no authority to do so, this past May, Trump successfully pressured the postal board to install David Steiner, formerly a board member at FedEx, a private industry competitor, at the helm of the Postal Service.
Despite these unprecedented attacks, one of our oldest cornerstone institutions has persisted, and our mail runs. Postal workers deliver prescriptions, Social Security checks, vote-by-mail ballots, holiday gifts and cards from families far away, and other essential packages in every ZIP code. Take a moment to send a note of thanks to postal workers this holiday season to let them know how much you appreciate their hard work and public service.
THE THREAT OF STEALTH PRIVATIZATION
The threat of USPS privatization is still very real, and the fight isn’t over. In 2026 and beyond, our coalition and partners will be watching closely for signs of stealth privatization. Stealth privatization is a combination of the government and corporations taking actions that slowly chip away at USPS’ strength, relevance, consumer confidence, and reputation so corporations can get their hands on the post office and rip it apart for good just to make a buck. Unlike a hostile takeover attempt, like earlier this year, the current threat is a more piecemeal approach. Trump and his Wall Street buddies are well aware not only that USPS has broad and bipartisan public support, but that communities will and do mobilize, loudly, in defense of USPS.
A massive and highly visible public institution like the post office will remain in danger on many fronts as long as the Trump administration holds power. In advance of the midterm elections next year, President Trump preemptively struck against the agency by signing executive orders that continue the false narrative about voting fraud by mail. Dismantling the post office, and undermining it as a reliable institution that the public trusts to deliver their mail in ballots, and guarantee affordable universal service, would be a financial win for authoritarianism and the billionaire tech oligarchs who are lined up to profit from privatization—like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos. Like Trump, they are hell-bent on destroying the public sector to amass even more wealth, and more power. Amazon has already threatened to pull billions of dollars in contracts with USPS and just build their own delivery network, which would lead to huge profits for Bezos, Trump, and all their greedy Wall Street cronies while also decimating a huge unionized workforce that operates one of the most advanced and expansive delivery networks in the world.
A BETTER WAY FORWARD
As Steiner settles into his first year at the helm of the public Postal Service, he will undoubtedly use pages from the privatization playbook in his plans for the future of the post office.
Alternatively, The People’s Postal Agenda, first launched in 2021, provides a roadmap for the future of a Postal Service that highlights innovations to address unmet needs and ensure this treasured public agency can continue to serve communities for generations to come.
The post office should build on its public service history of serving every community, no matter how remote. USPS was never intended to be profitable. The agency is a public service institution first and foremost, one with a legacy of postal employment as a pathway to the Black middle class to meet unmet needs, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color.
Postmaster General Steiner and the postal board must focus on expanding and imagining services to generate new revenue, that could include everything from hunting licenses to checking on seniors, adding value to bus and subway passes, providing office services and a WiFi signal in the parking lot, census outreach and verification for social security and EBT cards, even electric vehicle charging stations and affordable delivery for local food producers, all potential sources of revenue to sustain one of nation’s most trusted institutions for the next 250 years.