Head of Postal Service agrees to let DOGE work with USPS

(CNN) — US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has signed an agreement with the Department of Government Efficiency and the General Services Administration to work with the US Postal Service

In a letter DeJoy sent to Congress on Thursday, he said DOGE teams will “assist us in identifying and achieving further efficiencies,” saying the Elon Musk-led agency will focus on improving the management of USPS retirement assets and the Workers’ Compensation Program, as well as addressing the agency’s legislative mandates and regulatory requirements.

“The DOGE team was gracious enough to ask for the big problems they can help us with,” DeJoy wrote in the letter. “It has long been known that the Postal Service has a broken business model that was not financially sustainable without critically necessary and fundamental core change.”

The Postal Service, an independent government agency, has already cut roughly 30,000 employees from its workforce since 2021, and plans to slash another 10,000 people in the next 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program, DeJoy said in the letter. The agency currently employs approximately 635,000 workers across the US.

DeJoy, who President Donald Trump hired in 2020 to run the Postal Service as it struggled to survive financial woes from the Covid-19 pandemic, announced last month he plans to step down from his role as Postmaster General. He was a businessman and Trump donor before taking office.

DeJoy argues in the letter USPS retirement assets and the Workers’ Compensation Program have been “mismanaged,” creating a financial hole that its leaders have struggled to dig out of.

DeJoy also called the Postal Regulatory Commission “an unnecessary agency that has inflicted over $50 billion in damage to the Postal Service by administering defective pricing models and decades old bureaucratic processes that encumber the Postal Service.”

Calls for privatization as DOGE slashes the federal government

Earlier this month, Musk said he believes the Postal Service and Amtrak should be privatized.

USPS is four years into a reorganization initiative called Delivering for America, designed to cut costs and improve efficiency at the agency. But the plan has faced scrutiny at times amid poor mail performance.

By law, the Postal Service is a self-funded agency, and it has been losing money for years, though it recently reported $144 million in net income for the final three months of 2024. It was the first profitable quarter since the April through June period of 2022. It posted a $9.5 billion net loss in the fiscal year ending this past September, up from a loss $6.5 billion the previous year.

“Fixing a broken organization that had experienced close to $100 billion in losses and was projected to lose another $200 billion, without a bankruptcy proceeding, is a daunting task,” DeJoy said in the letter. “Fixing a heavily legislated and overly regulated organization as massive, important, cherished, misunderstood and debated as the United States Postal Service, with such a broken business model, is even more difficult.”

Democrats quickly criticized DeJoy’s decision, as DOGE continues to gut the federal workforce, laying off tens of thousands of federal workers.

“The only thing worse for the Postal Service than DeJoy’s ‘Delivering for America’ plan is turning the service over to Elon Musk and DOGE so they can undermine it, privatize it, and then profit off Americans’ loss,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, the ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “This capitulation will have catastrophic consequences for all Americans – especially those in rural and hard to reach areas – who rely on the Postal Service every day to deliver mail, medications, ballots, and more. Reliable mail delivery can’t just be reserved for MAGA supporters and Tesla owners.”

Trump has said he’s looking to change the USPS, including giving the secretary of commerce authority over what has been an independent organization for more than 50 years. It’s a move that could be a first step towards privatization and could upend how Americans get critical deliveries including online purchases, prescription drugs, checks and vote-by-mail ballots.

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