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In mid-March, the Postmaster General told Congress that the United States Postal Service would be unable to deliver mail within twelve months unless Congress lifted its debt limit. Shortly thereafter, in response to rising energy prices following the US war on Iran, USPS announced a fuel surcharge on packages, a first ever in its fifty-five year history as a government corporation. Around the same time, Amazon presented USPS with the double insult of cutting its contract (USPS’s largest) by 20 percent and, according to the logistics consulting and analytics firm ShipMatrix, surpassing it in parcel volume.

The clouds on the horizon for USPS have coincided with the revival of proposals for postal privatization, long a dream of conservatives and neoliberals. In 2018, the first Trump administration called for privatization of the USPS, and in 2019 the Treasury Department attempted to assume control of USPS business decisions. But with the second term the threat has become more concrete. Even before the inauguration, in December 2024 the president-elect reiterated that the agency was on the proverbial chopping block. “We didn’t finish the job in the first term,” Carey Mulligan, the chief economist of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the first Trump administration, said at the time, “but we should finish it now.” In February 2025, Wells Fargo’s Equity Research team, an arm of its investment banking business, answered the call by publishing a “framework” for postal privatization, further whetting the private sector’s appetite.

What would privatization entail? Will the current struggles of rising energy costs, imperilled congressional appropriations, continued growth of private competition, and decreasing revenue from Amazon give such machinations new life? For postal privatization to proceed, there would need to be congressional action to overturn the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 (which established USPS in its current form), a vote that would no doubt make legislators on both sides of the aisle queasy. While this does not seem like an imminent possibility, just months after Wells Fargo published its privatization framework, the USPS Board of Governors elected David Steiner, a member of the FedEx board of directors, as Postmaster General. By 2028, all eight of the members of USPS’s Board of Governors will be Trump appointees.

The unfortunate predicament of the post office is not going away, and this administration seems intent on letting no crisis go to waste. Senator Bernie Sanders has rightly said that the privatization of the post office would be a disaster. Here I’d like to get concrete about precisely why and how.

Mail and parcels

With examples like the privatization of British Petroleum or Japanese National Railways in mind, one immediate question about the future of the US Postal Service is: why couldn’t private entities provide these services, or at least a market-inflected approximation?

In most accounts, the problem is the margins: much of what USPS does is unprofitable, USPS as a whole requires some federal subsidy, and so private companies simply wouldn’t want to provide its level of service. But Amazon is rapidly building out its rural delivery network, in recognition that rural customers buy plenty of things too. If it has found a way to make this work, along with plenty of other modern marvels, why not postal service?

The answer is quite simple: no private company has built logistical infrastructure even approximating the breadth and coverage of USPS. It’s not that private entities won’t deliver postal service; it’s that they quite literally can’t.

To see why, it’s worth diving into the basics of the Wells Fargo privatization framework, which has two essential components: first, sell or IPO the parcel business, the largest category of USPS revenue and the part that the big parcel carriers care most about. Second, continue to subsidize the remaining mail-only operation and pay for worker buyout packages, funding both by selling off USPS land—“unlocking $85 billion of real estate,” in their words.

This framework helps clarify, first and foremost, that no private entity wants any part of having to deliver the actual mail. USPS operates under what’s called a Universal Service Obligation (USO) to deliver mail to every address in the US, six days a week—“from remote Alaskan communities to the bottom of the Grand Canyon,” in the words of David Yao, Vice President of the Greater Seattle Area Local of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU). Such concepts of “universal service” are as old as regulated monopolies themselves on both sides of the North Atlantic, and since USPS became an independent government corporation in 1971 it has been under one.

This commitment is not simply an “inefficiency” that any private company would rationalize. It is also something that is logistically impossible for any private...