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Former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy avoided several third-rail issues, as part of his plans to modernize the Postal Service — including privatizing the agency, closing post offices or cutting the number of delivery days each week.
Leaders of three USPS unions say they aren’t so sure DeJoy’s successor or the Trump administration will agree to the same red lines, as the White House envisions major changes for the independent mail agency.
President Donald Trump floated the possibility of privatizing USPS in a press conference in December, an idea he considered during his first term in office. More recently, Trump said the Commerce Department is considering taking control of USPS.
“We have a White House administration that is openly talking about privatizing the public postal service — selling it off, breaking it up to private corporations for private profit. Whatever people thought about Louis DeJoy, he did not prove to be a privatize,” American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein said Tuesday at the National Press Club. “It’s my belief that Louis DeJoy was pushed out by this administration to help pave the way for some of their plans.”
The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Trump administration hastened DeJoy’s departure from USPS.
DeJoy set some of those boundaries with an incoming team from the Department of Government Efficiency. In one of his letters to Congress, DeJoy said DOGE members would have limited access to agency data, and said the team is not intended to “make the organization more suited to privatization.”
DeJoy stepped down from the agency on Monday, after announcing plans for his departure last month.
The postal unions have led rallies across the country, pushing back against a privatized USPS. The Postal Service is the largest unionized employer in the U.S.
Dimondstein said DeJoy “generally respected the unions,” although APWU, in some cases, raised concerns about his 10-year Delivering for America plan.
“You have natural disagreements and arguments and differences,” he said.
Dimondstein credited DeJoy with creating a “better path” for pre-career USPS employees to transition to career positions with better pay and benefits.
Unions wary of USPS privatization
Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers Union, said a privatized USPS “disproportionately would impact our rural communities.”
“The makeup of the Board of Governors certainly is going to have a lot of influence on who the next Postmaster General will be, and how that individual will view privatization, working with the labor unions, continuing with the Delivering for America plan that Louis DeJoy started,” Maston said.
Four members of the USPS Board of Governors were nominated by former President Joe Biden, and two were picked by President Donald Trump during his first term in office.
“Whoever the Board of Governors selects needs to be in harmony with the plan as it’s already been designed, and is moving forward,” Maston said.
Tameka Brown, president of the Louisiana Rural Letter Carriers Association, said USPS is often a “lifeline” for rural customers.
“They depend on us, so it’s more than just delivering the mail and parcels. We’re a service to them,” Brown said.
National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian Renfroe credited DeJoy with taking on a “long-overdue” modernization of the USPS network.
“The devil, of course, is in the details, and while there are certainly parts of that effort over the years that have resulted in service challenges and things like that, that we have worked really hard to address, it is important, in a general sense, to continue modernizing the Postal Service,” Renfroe
USPS under DeJoy’s tenure opened massive new mail processing facilities across the country and planned on running trucks less often between those plants and post offices to transport mail.
Following bipartisan pushback from Congress, DeJoy agreed to put some network modernization changes on hold, at least until January 2025, after USPS saw persistent declines in on-time mail delivery in the regions where it opened its first regional mail processing mega-centers.
“It’s very important that it is modernized. It’s very important that we invest in the infrastructure and whoever is the next postmaster general, in order to do such an investment, has to do it — number one — with service in mind,” Renfroe said.
DeJoy upgraded facilities with equipment to process packages more quickly, in the hopes of growing its package business.
Before these changes, the USPS network remained virtually unchanged for decades, and was built to deliver mail and periodicals — products that are bringing in less revenue for USPS.
“We’ve seen a rise in packages, so package growth is very important to a vibrant future. But so are new and enhanced services. The post office could do so much more,” Dimondstein said.
DeJoy told lawmakers in a December 2023 letter that total mail volume fell by 42% between 2007 and 2020, and that revenue fell by 36%. “This trend will continue,” he wrote.
Despite positive financial results in the first quarter of fiscal 2025, USPS posted a nearly $1.3 billion loss for February, according to its latest filing with its regulator.
That’s nearly three times the $491 million net loss USPS projected for that month, and nearly quadruple the $377 million net loss it saw in February 2024.
The agency’s competitive package volume is down 9.8% compared to levels from February 2024, and more than 12% below its plan for this month.
USPS, so far, has seen a $1.8 billion net loss — higher than the $1.33 billion net loss it projected at this point in the year. It expects to end the year with a $6.9 billion net loss.
Post office closures ‘dead in the water’
DeJoy told lawmakers last week that the DOGE team will help USPS review its leases for 31,000 retail centers, including post offices.
More than half of all current post offices, he said, fail to cover the cost of their local operations, and “future lease renewals will be even more difficult to support financially,” once decades-long leases expire.
Dimondstein said the message raises concerns that USPS may consider closing some post offices.
“There’s certainly some danger signals in that statement. We oppose post office closings,” Dimonstein said. “We’re not set up to make money in each post office. We’re set up to make to break even as a whole.”
Renfroe said possible post office closures were a “big topic of conversation” when DeJoy began drafting his 10-year reform plan.
“Essentially, the message that we sent was, ‘You start trying to close post offices, you’re dead in the water.’ So, whether it’s DOGE, new leadership at the Postal Service, or anybody else, they start trying to close post offices, they’re going to have a hell of a fight like they never imagined,” Renfroe said.
Carissa Powell, a postal clerk in the Congress Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C., said many of her customers are older residents who live at a nearby senior center.
“It’s their daily routine to come into the post office. Most of them are within walking distance,” Powell said. “If they close my post office, they will be devastated.”
Under DeJoy’s 10-year reform plan, USPS cut its workforce by about 30,000 positions since fiscal 2021 — and is on track to cut another 10,000 positions through early retirement buyouts.
Dimondstein said about 9,000 APWU members took the early retirement offers.
“That doesn’t mean that all of those people will not be replaced. Some of them definitely will need to be replaced and should be, and others may not,” he said.
Renfroe said the union hasn’t had any talks with USPS about early retirement offers for letter carriers. The current letter carrier workforce, he added, is “well-aligned with the work we do.”
“Any reduction in the staffing that we have would directly result in challenges to service and being able to deliver all the mail,” he said.
The post After DeJoy’s exit, USPS unions wary of Trump’s shakeup first appeared on Federal News Network.