The US Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors is preparing to name David Steiner, a current member of FedEx’s Board of Directors, as the next Postmaster General (PMG), according to a report in the Washington Post. The selection is reportedly being made at the behest of Donald Trump.

The move signals a massive escalation of attacks on the post office, especially its privatization, which both Trump and Elon Musk, head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” (DOGE) support. But privatization would be the culmination of decades of bipartisan attacks, beginning with its demotion from a cabinet level department to an independent, self-funding agency under President Richard Nixon.

The situation urgently requires organized resistance by postal workers and their allies in the working class. As the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee explained in a statement in March: “This requires new organizations, rank-and-file committees, to mobilize ourselves independently of Trump’s collaborators in the Democrats and the union tops. We must safeguard our own initiative and begin organizing now rather than waiting for ‘permission’ from the top which will never come.”

  • tischbier@feddit.org
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    24 hours ago

    We can’t forget that the USPS did operate in the “green.” Until Republicans in the 1990’s passed legislation that required post office workers a fat retirement pension. The pension program was specifically designed to run the “profitable” USPS into the “red.”

    So, Republicans now 30 years later get to boohoo and cry about the inefficiency they manufactured to seize control of public assets to fill their own private suit pockets.

    Sickening. Actually makes me physically ill thinking about this. I cannot wait for their comeuppance.

    • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      It’s not that they changed the amount of individual pensions. What they did is force them to pre-fund the pensions to a ridiculous degree.

      They were funding pensions for people that hadn’t even been born yet.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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      24 hours ago

      Just like the tariffs, the loss of a functional post office is going to hurt far more things deeper than they realize. Or like everything else, they understand it will break things but only care about what they’re getting out of it.