Chris Edwards and Yasmeen Kallash-Kyler
In a seeming reversal, the Trump administration is rumored to be considering ending the US Postal Service’s quasi-independence and absorbing the company into the federal bureaucracy. The Washington Post reported yesterday, “Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department.”
That would be a mistake, creating an agency even more distant from the entrepreneurial postal system that America needs. Milton and Rose Friedman described entrepreneur Pat Brennan’s battle against government mail back in their 1980 Free to Choose television series:
Pat Brennan became something of a celebrity in 1978 because she was delivering mail in competition with the United States Post Office. With her husband she set up business in a basement in Rochester. New York, soon it was thriving. They charged less than the Post Office and they guaranteed delivery the same day of parcels and letters in downtown Rochester. There is no doubt now that they were breaking the law as it stood. The Post Office took them to court, the case against them was simply that they should not be handling letters. The Brennans decided to fight, and local businessmen provided the financial backing.
[Pat Brennan:] “I think there’s going to be a quiet revolt and perhaps we are the beginning of it. That you see people bucking the bureaucrats where years ago you wouldn’t dream of doing that because you’d be squelched. Now, with tax revolts and with what we’re doing, people have decided that their fates are their own and not up to somebody in Washington who has no interest in them whatsoever. So, it’s not a question of anarchy but it’s a question of people rethinking the power of the bureaucrats and rejecting it.”
The revolt against the government postal system has taken longer than Brennan had hoped. Despite decades of technological advances, including email, Congress still imposes a legal monopoly on snail mail. Entrepreneurs are busting open space travel, but the government still dominates postal services, passenger rail, air traffic control, airports, transit systems, and many other industries.
Sometimes Trump does “rethink the power of the bureaucrats,” as he did back in December musing about USPS privatization. Is he now changing his mind and considering burying the USPS in the stagnant bureaucracy? We hope not. The USPS’s inefficiency and losses are directly attributable to federal ownership and political mandates, as discussed here. Full privatization would provide the flexibility that the company needs to adjust and survive in our continually evolving economy.
Here’s a 1978 NYT piece describing Brennan’s battle. This 1979 piece in Reason summarizes USPS policy at the time. This study examines postal privatization.