The U.S. Postal Service, long a punching bag for complaints about late deliveries and rising costs, might soon get a shake-up straight out of a movie plot—only this time, it’s not Seinfeld character Newman pulling the strings. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy recently inked a deal with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the General Services Administration, bringing in some high-profile help to tackle the agency’s woes.
In a letter to Congress dated March 13, 2025, DeJoy laid out the plan, saying DOGE—led by none other than Elon Musk—will zero in on straightening out the Postal Service’s tangled retirement funds, Workers’ Compensation Program, and a mess of outdated regulations.
DeJoy didn’t mince words in the letter. “The DOGE team asked us for the big problems they could sink their teeth into,” he wrote, pointing to a “broken business model” that’s been bleeding money for years. The Postal Service has already shed about 30,000 jobs since 2021, and DeJoy’s got another 10,000 voluntary retirements lined up in the next month. With a workforce hovering around 635,000, that’s no small trim. The man who took the helm in 2020 under President Trump—a businessman and GOP donor with no prior postal experience—says he’s on his way out, but not before handing DOGE the keys to some of USPS’s thorniest issues.
The financial picture isn’t pretty. DeJoy called out mismanagement of retirement assets and workers’ comp, alongside what he sees as meddling from the Postal Regulatory Commission—an agency he claims has cost USPS over $50 billion with faulty pricing and red tape. Meanwhile, the agency’s been slogging through its “Delivering for America” overhaul since 2021, aiming to cut costs and boost efficiency. Results? Mixed. Mail deliveries took some hits, but the last quarter of 2024 brought a rare $144 million profit—the first in over two years. Still, the fiscal year closed with a $9.5 billion loss, worse than the $6.5 billion hole the year before.
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Enter DOGE, the Musk-led outfit tasked with slashing government bloat. Musk’s already on record saying USPS (and Amtrak) should go private, a sentiment echoed by folks like Alabama Congressman Robert Aderholt (R), who took to X to vent and ask for Musk’s help getting it back on track, noting, “It’s currently a disaster and an embarrassment.” Aderholt’s not alone—his office gets more gripes about mail than anything else. Privatization chatter was heating up, and Trump floated giving the Commerce Secretary oversight of the agency, a move that could nudge it out of its independent status for the first time since 1971.
But not everyone’s cheering. Democrats like Rep. Gerry Connolly (VA), a top voice on the House Oversight Committee, are sounding alarms. “The only thing worse for the Postal Service than DeJoy’s ‘Delivering for America’ plan is turning the service over to Elon Musk and DOGE so they can undermine it, privatize it, and then profit off Americans’ loss,” said Connolly. “This capitulation will have catastrophic consequences for all Americans – especially those in rural and hard-to-reach areas – who rely on the Postal Service every day to deliver mail, medications, ballots, and more. Reliable mail delivery can’t just be reserved for MAGA supporters and Tesla owners.”
DeJoy, for his part, sees it as a last-ditch fix. “Turning around an organization that’s lost nearly $100 billion—and was on track to lose $200 billion more—without bankruptcy is brutal,” he wrote. Add in heavy regulation and a business model that’s “cherished, misunderstood, and debated,” and you’ve got a Herculean task. Whether DOGE is the hero or the villain in this story depends on who’s watching. For now, the Postal Service is at a crossroads—streamlined survival or a privatized reboot. Either way, your next package might come with a side of Musk-flavored disruption.
Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing much-needed accountability to our out-of-control bureaucracy as they take a chainsaw to rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.
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