“No matter how you voted in last year’s election, no one voted to destroy the postal service,” reads an American Postal Workers Union (APWU) pamphlet.
The APWU heard fighting words in the suggestion made by unelected billionaire Elon Musk that the United States Postal Service (USPS) should be privatized. Appointed to lead DOGE, an agency dedicated to identifying cost cutting opportunities in President Trump’s government, Musk offered his sentiment on March 5 at a technology conference.
Musk’s statement follows on the heels of similar statements made by Trump himself, as well as an article in the Washington Post reporting that Trump was considering an executive order to disband the board which oversees the USPS, moving the service entirely under the purview of the Secretary of Commerce.
Outraged, the APWU announced a day of action and protest rallies for March 20, titled, Hands Off Our Public Postal Service — The U.S. Mail Is Not for Sale.
In midtown Kingston, the president of the APWU Local 4770, Ed Horvers, stood outside the Cornell Street Post Office and glad-handed with 20 or so supporters. The din of drivers honking their horns as they passed by was a frequent interruption.
“Over 150 local offices throughout the United States are pulling a rally today,” said Horvers. “This is nationwide.”
Rally attendee and mail carrier Harry Ludnick said, “Private operations think in terms of cost-cutting and losses. The way we should be thinking about this is in terms of investment in infrastructure and people. The country is not a company and the people don’t want their country to be run like one.”
Anyone can use America’s public postal service, Ludnick says. And some do more frequently than others.
“As of right now,” Horvers adds, “the United States Postal Service has still been delivering Amazon packages. What Amazon does is they give us all the heavy, big stuff and they take care of the little packages. Because it’s Prime.”
Horvers said USPS stopped taking packages from United Parcel Service (UPS) after that contract was terminated. He couldn’t say how much the competition paid working for UPS or FedEx versus working for the USPS.
“I’m more curious about making sure that this post office stands for the people. And that it stays for the people because it was created by the congress and the Constitution.”
The USPS’s financial losses make it an attractive target for privatization. An independent government agency with 635,000 employees reporting $79.5 billion in revenues in 2024, net losses measured in the billions of dollars have been on the rise for years. The USPS reported $4.1 billion in losses in 2021, $6.5 billion in 2023, and $9.5 billion in 2024.
To hear management tell it, it’s the generous wages and benefits which have put the postal service increasingly in the red.
Head of the Postal Service, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, ascribes the losses to increases in operating expenses due to “interest rate impacts on workers’ compensation fair-value adjustments and inflationary impacts on retirement costs and compensation costs.”
A prodigious Republican Party donor and fundraiser, DeJoy has run the Postal Service since his appointment during President Trump’s first term in office in 2020. Postmaster generals are not appointed by the president but by a board of governors but the board of governors who appointed DeJoy were all appointed by Trump. Following Trump’s re-election, DeJoy has since announced he will step down.
As an agency independent of the executive, the USPS is beyond the reach of both Musk’s cost-cutting operation and Trump’s workforce cuts executed in other agencies. DeJoy informed congress of plans to reduce its workforce by 10,000 workers through a voluntary early retirement program first announced in January. DeJoy had already cut 30,000 jobs since 2021. He also has also signed paperwork expressing his intent to cooperate with Musk’s cost-cutting endeavor.
“Look at that sign,” said Ludnick, waving at a honking truck. “Make America jobless again…”
“I could have retired actually,” Horvers said. “They just had a package deal, an opportunity for anybody who wanted to get out early but I didn’t take it. It’s a lot of things. A lot of intangibles. They’re trying to cut jobs. They’re just trying to not hire as much. They’re trying to downsize.”
With their familiar blue-painted street mailboxes, their blue mail-carrier uniforms and their boxy little white mail trucks, the USPS has been an independent government agency since a successful strike in 1970 won the unions the rights to negotiate on wages, benefits and working conditions. But they’ve been delivering mail in one form or another for much longer.
This congressionally mandated postal service will celebrate its 250-year anniversary as a government service on July 4, 2025.
If the unions can keep it.
Join the family! 
