USPS strikes deal with Elon Musk’s DOGE team for reform help as agency agrees to cut 10K workers
The United States Postal Service has struck a deal with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team that’ll see 10,000 workers cut and billions of dollars stripped from the money-losing agency’s budget, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy revealed.
DOGE has agreed to assist USPS with addressing “big problems” at the $78 billion-a-year independent government agency, DeJoy told Congress in a letter fired off Thursday.
DeJoy said the agreement with DOGE and the General Services Administration would allow the Musk-led deficit-cutting team to “assist us in identifying and achieving further efficiencies.”
“The DOGE team was gracious enough to ask for big problems they can help us with,” the Postmaster General wrote.
As part of cost-cutting measures, he said the service plans to cut 10,000 employees in the next 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program.
The agency – which currently employs about 640,000 workers – shed 30,000 employees back in 2021.
“This is an effort aligned with our efforts, as while we have accomplished a great deal, there is much more to be done,” DeJoy wrote of the deal.
Elsewhere in his letter, DeJoy flagged a number of issues that are currently “restricting normal business practice” — including management of retirement assets and its workers’ compensation program by other government agencies, unfunded mandates and burdensome regulatory requirements.
The postal service, which has so far been untouched by DOGE, lost roughly $9.5 billion last year.
DeJoy has led a dramatic effort to restructure the post office over the last five years – using similar tactics to the DOGE team, including cutting the workforce and canceling or renegotiating contracts.
He said in his letter that the Postal Regulatory Commission “is an unnecessary agency that has inflicted over $50 billion in damage to the Postal Service by administering defective pricing models and decades-old bureaucratic processes.”
The Postal Regulatory Commission, however, fired back, arguing that USPS had wasted $100 billion in financial assistance from Congress and the commission — losing more money and “making USPS less efficient, and collapsing service, especially for rural Americans.”
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a top Dem on the committee overseeing USPS, ripped the deal, arguing DeJoy was allowing DOGE to “infiltrate” the agency.
He suggested, too, that DOGE would “undermine it, privatize it, and then profit off Americans’ loss.”
“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,” he said in a statement.
In response to Thursday’s letter, National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian L. Renfroe said they would welcome anyone’s help addressing some of the agency’s biggest problems but were firmly against any move to privatize the service.
“Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees’ jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily,” he said in a statement.
With Post wires
