Is It Time to Privatize the USPS?

Here’s an idea: Let’s create a federally sponsored corporation to spend $89.5 billion a year moving stuff—mostly documents made of paper—from place to place. Let’s hire 635,000 people to do it, grant them expensive health and pension benefits such that personnel costs are 80 percent of the total, then make it almost impossible to lay them off.

Let’s keep doing so long after the service has been rendered technologically obsolete, and demand for it has cratered. In fact, let’s keep it up even though recipients have decided that nearly three-fifths of what we deliver to them is “junk” that they discard almost as soon as it arrives.

Insane, you say? Well, what you have just read is an accurate portrayal of the United States Postal Service, which lost $9.5 billion shuffling paper around the country in fiscal year 2024, while Americans sent one another six billion text messages daily. Half the people surveyed in 2021 hadn’t received a personal letter in five years; 14 percent had never received one.

And yes, 58 percent of the letters people do get is “marketing mail”—ads, catalogs, credit card offers—which the USPS handles for the private sector at a discount rate, even though the recipient’s mailbox is usually just a brief stop en route to the recycling bin.

So who could blame the postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, for resigning this week? He spent five years trying, with limited success, to reform the USPS, which has morphed from a national necessity to a national burden.