President-elect Donald Trump has expressed an interest in privatizing the United States Postal Service (USPS) due to its financial losses, according to a report.
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At Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, Trump discussed his first-term goals of overhauling the USPS with his nominee for commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, reported the Washington Post. The President-elect consulted a group of transition officials regarding his intended privatization of the agency, said one of three people with knowledge of the matter who spoke to the Post.
The sources also stated that Trump was allegedly against the organization receiving government subsidies, citing USPS’s financial losses as reasoning.
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In 2019, Trump entered a public disagreement with the USPS during his first presidential term when trying to convince the organization to hand control of some key functions over to his Treasury Department, including rate-setting, personnel decisions, labor relations and managing relationships with its largest clients.
“The government is slow, slow, slow—decades slow on adopting new ways of doing things, and there’s a lot of [other] carrier services that became legal in the ’70s that are doing things so much better with increased volumes and reduced costs,” said Casey Mulligan, who served as a high profile economist during the first Trump administration. “We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now.”
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Founded in 1775 with Benjamin Franklin as its chief, the United States Postal Service is older than the nation. In the 20th century, the service saw renewed activity and demand when it began offering free rural delivery. The agency then became financially self-sustaining later in the 20th century, aiming to “bind the nation together”.
Despite modernizing its equipment and investing in new technological facilities, the Postal Service still lost $9.5 billion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. This is largely due to the decline of paper mail and parcel shipping times that are often slower than expected.
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“The United States Postal Service is already engaged in an initiative to ensure that we can provide our customers with a high level of service to every delivery address in the nation at least six-days-a-week in an efficient and financially sustainable fashion as required by law,” said the agency in a statement responding to questions regarding its potential privatization.
