So, what are Trump's plans for the Postal Service?
And would term limits make Congress work better?
Not quite two weeks ago the Washington Post reported that President Donald J. Trump was soon to issue an executive order that would fire all the members of the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors and merge the independent agency into the Department of Commerce.
We’re still waiting on that executive order.
I was not entirely surprised by the report. I had heard from long-timers in the postal community that the White House was going to do something. And earlier in the week President Trump had issued an executive order mandating independent agencies of the executive branch —like the Post Office and Consumer Financial Protection Board— to run their proposed regulations through the Office of Management Budget just like any other agency.
The Post’s story produced a lot of reporters’ calls to me. Can Trump legally fire the Governors? Can he merge the agency into the Commerce Department and deem Sec. Howard Lutnick the new boss? In both cases, the answer is no, not legally. Here’s what I told them.
The postal law that passed Congress and signed by Richard Nixon in 1970 established the USPS as an “independent agency of the executive branch.” To this end, the law declared the agency would be run by a Postmaster General, who would be selected by a Board of Governors, whose members could only be removed for cause. It also gave the agency the authority to submit its own annual budget requests, to be sued in its own name, to issue debt at its own discretion, to price its products in consultation with its regulator (today known as the Postal Regulatory Commission), and to decide who to hire and what facilities it needed to erect or rent. As such, it is very difficult to conceive how an independent agency could legally be merged into another agency through an executive order. Congress would need to pass a law.
So might Mr. Trump take control of the Post Office anyway? Yes, he might. Would he be sued? Yes, he would be sued, and the President may want that. He seems to believe the Supreme Court would uphold his action and declare unconstitutional the 1970 postal law’s appointments provisions and independent status. (If you want to dive further into this constitutional stuff, check out these two Wall Street Journal pieces and Gabe Fleisher’s long post.)
But here’s another thing I have been telling reporters: swapping leaders at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is no magic fix. The agency is bleeding money because it was built to be a self-funding monopoly deliverer of paper mail. Demand for that service has plunged 48 percent since 2008 and delivering packages is a very different business wherein the USPS must compete with very skilled private firms, like UPS, Fed-Ex, Amazon, etc.
For at least a decade I have been told Capitol Hill and anyone who would listen that the USPS is experiencing an existential crisis. Here I said it in 2015. Here I said it in 2019. And I said it last week in my monthly Washington Examiner column.
So, saving the USPS means that Congress will have to quit pretending it still is 1990 and ask itself two basic questions: what do we need the USPS to do in the 21st century and how will we pay for it?
One last matter: I am delighted Axios has picked up on an idea I and others have been promoting for years: allowing the USPS to better invest the funds in its Retiree Health Benefits Fund and its pensions. Presently, these dollars are parked in U.S. Treasury bonds, which provide a very low rate of return compared to indexed stock funds.
Making this change to the present law could bring the Postal Service $2 to $3 billion a year in additional revenue. This reform would garner bipartisan support. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) introduced a bill in 2019 that proposed something similar, and legislators on the political right long have supported reforms to bolster Americans’ retirement accounts. This reform is a no-brainer and certainly would help the agency.
Term limits: A reform looking for a problem?
Recently I chatted with Professor Casey Burgat about a perennially popular idea: term limits. Would they improve Congress's functioning?
Casey, by the way, has a new book out: We Hold These "Truths": How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back (Authors Equity). It includes a chapter on the topic of term limits, which Casey basically deems a solution in search of a problem.
Click here to listen to our chat or you can tune in on Apple, Spotify, and other podcast outlets.
Ohio never fails me
I was in Ohio last weekend and opened up Facebook Marketplace, which is a great place to find interesting stuff. Well, this item was one of the first things that popped up.
While it might look awesome installed on the roof of my DC apartment, I did not buy it. But you can!
By the way, I am on these social media channels should you want to connect there: BlueSky, Facebook, and X.com.
And if you dig drinks, books, and travel, please check out my Beverages, Books, and More.