Trump's USPS Privatization Fantasy Is A Gut Punch To His Biggest Supporters
Rural America is Trump's political base, and he is repaying their support by threatening to privatize the United States Postal Service.
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In rural America, the United States Postal Service is a lifeline that provides essential service to the hardest-to-reach parts of the country. Those who live in urban and suburban areas may not understand how vital the postal service is, so here is an example from my own life.
I live in a small college town that has been deemed too small to have a FedEx store. If someone wants to ship by FedEx, they either have to pay to schedule a pickup or hope their package fits into the FedEx drop box in town. The only private shipper is a UPS Store a few miles from town.
Do you know what my town does have?
A post office centrally located with 24-hour lobby self-service. Anybody can ship anything at any time. It is a public service, and there always seem to be people at the post office.
If I travel 10-20 minutes out of town, I am in the heart of rural Western Pennsylvania. These are small towns and villages with older populations that might be 30 minutes to an hour from the nearest private shipping store. Each community has a post office, and they all voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Joe Biden could not legally fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. By law, only the postal service board can fire DeJoy. Biden did his part by turning over the board with his appointees, who now have a majority, but they haven’t fired DeJoy and likely won’t.
All of this brings us to Donald Trump and the chatter that he is looking at USPS privatization.
The Washington Post reported, “President-elect Donald Trump has expressed a keen interest in privatizing the U.S. Postal Service in recent weeks, three people with knowledge of the matter said, a move that could shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and push hundreds of thousands of federal workers out of the government.”
Trump may be interested in privatization but can’t do it alone.
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