The list of federal agencies and institutions President Donald Trump has poisoned with his naked corruption and contempt for democracy is long. And now, with his most recent attempt to seize control of American elections, seemingly to prevent the electoral whupping his party appears headed for in November, we can add one of our most beloved national treasures: the United States Postal Service.
If you’ve ever been frustrated by a slow line at the post office, you might find that assertion jarring. But the USPS is indeed a treasure, at once a marvel of logistical engineering — it delivers more than 100 billion pieces of mail a year — and an embodiment of profoundly American values. And Trump is determined to ruin it.
Last week, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court used its “shadow docket” to lift a stay issued by a lower court against a recent executive order Trump signed, which Trump says is meant to curb voter widespread fraud — though his administration still hasn’t provided evidence to back that allegation — but which more likely is an attempt to attack Americans’ right to vote by mail.
The order instructed the Department of Homeland Security to demand voter rolls from states, then create its own lists of those it believes are truly eligible to vote. Then the order instructs the USPS to refuse to deliver mail ballots in any state that has not complied with the administration’s demands — inevitably, states run by Democrats.
The legal issues in the court’s ruling are somewhat arcane, and in the end, Trump may not be allowed to carry out his scheme — at least not in this election. But his plan is unconstitutional for the simple reason that the president and the executive branch have no role whatsoever in the administration of elections; that job is left to the states, while Congress has the power to regulate “Times, Places, and Manner” of congressional elections. Trump’s attempt to illegally commandeer that system for his own purposes would be bad enough if the USPS wasn’t involved. The way he’s doing it makes it even worse.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the USPS is one of the central foundations of American democracy. Our first Postmaster General was Benjamin Franklin, and the country’s founders understood that a well-functioning postal service was essential to creating a unified nation. That idea is written into U.S. law. Title 39 of the U.S. Code states, “The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.”
That idea — that universal mail service “bind[s] the Nation together” — is precisely what Trump is attacking by trying to turn the USPS into a partisan tool. From the moment he took office in his first term, he attacked the USPS relentlessly, almost as if he was harboring some kind of personal grudge. “The Postal Service is a joke,” he said in 2020, at a time when its employees were literally risking their lives during the Covid-19 pandemic to serve their communities. He has suggested privatizing the USPS, and as an alternative, proposed to seize control of it and put it under the jurisdiction of the Department of Commerce.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the USPS is one of the central foundations of American democracy. Our first Postmaster General was Benjamin Franklin, and the country’s founders understood that a well-functioning postal service was essential to creating a unified nation.
Working at the Postal Service has long been a way for Americans without college degrees to achieve a stable middle-class life. It has offered secure employment, good wages and union representation to millions of Americans who might have found those things hard to obtain elsewhere. That pathway of opportunity has been especially important for Black Americans. As MS NOW’s Jarvis DeBerry noted last year, the Government Accountability Office reported that in 2022, “about 53% of [the Postal Service’s] total workforce consisted of individuals from historically disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups, and women made up about 46% of the workforce.”
In addition, the Postal Service is a lifeline for rural Americans, many of whom can’t even get delivery from private companies like UPS and FedEx because it isn’t profitable enough — and when they do, it costs many times what using the Postal Service does. But the Postal Service picks up and delivers their mail at the same modest prices anyone pays, however far-flung they might be.
That’s because the USPS serves all of us, no matter who we are or where we live. And despite the jokes about lines at the post office, Americans love the USPS. Polls have long shown it to be one of the most popular government agencies. Only the National Park Service gets higher ratings.
For years, the USPS was financially anchored by an absurd requirement Republicans imposed in 2006 that it prefund billions of dollars in retiree benefits, on top of declining revenue as people turned to email. That requirement was finally eliminated in a law signed in 2022 by then-President Joe Biden, which stabilized the agency’s finances somewhat. But it is still hampered by the fact that unlike every other federal agency, it has to fund its own operations (and no one asks why the Defense Department isn’t turning a profit).
Earlier this year, Trump nominated a group of election deniers to serve on the USPS governing board, even though none of his nominees have experience in mail or logistics. The current postmaster general, David Steiner, is a former FedEx director who was nominally selected by the board in accordance with the law, but in fact Trump chose him and then urged the board to approve his pick, which it did.
Any questions about Steiner’s independence from Trump were answered when the USPS issued its final rule on Trump’s executive order. That rule said exactly what everyone concerned knew it would: Unless forbidden by the courts, the USPS will not deliver mail ballots in any state that has failed to comply with Trump’s demand to participate in his disenfranchisement project. In practice, this would almost certainly mean that voters in red states could vote by mail — as Trump himself does — while voters in most blue states couldn’t.
The legal questions are not yet settled, but let’s be clear about one thing: Just as the president has no authority to say how elections will be conducted, it’s not the job of the USPS to decide who gets to vote or whose votes will be counted. The USPS’ job is to deliver the mail. Full stop. Having failed to destroy the service that has given so much to the nation and its citizens, Trump is determined to corrupt it from within. Unfortunately, the only thing that may stop him now is a Supreme Court that hasn’t been too concerned about restraining Trump’s authoritarian impulses — or protecting every American’s right to vote.
The post The Postal Service is an American marvel. Trump wants to destroy it. appeared first on MS NOW.
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