WASHINGTON—If Donald Trump and Elon Musk have their way, and dismember and privatize the U.S. Postal Service, Letter Carriers member Jordan Costa, who lives in the Philadelphia suburb of Morrisville, still expects he would get his mail, even if he must pay more for it.
But his relatives who live in rural Pennsylvania, farther northeast up the Delaware River valley, are another matter. And so are the people he meets when he travels to rural Maine to hunt.
“My father’s family wouldn’t get it” six days a week, as the USPS now guarantees, Costa says. “They’d look at service once a week—and at an enormous rate.”
It’s stories like Costa’s and the prospect that the Republican President Trump and his puppeteer, mega-billionaire Elon Musk, plan to dismember the department, which drove almost 1,000 people to a loud protest in chilly temperatures just north of the U.S. Capitol on February 24.
Their object: To raise enough of a ruckus and to be loud enough to be heard, and heeded, by Congress, and especially its ruling Republicans. So far, that group has genuflected to Trump.
The crowd, led by Letter Carriers President Brian Renfroe, were upset by reports that Musk and Trump—whom at least one speaker called “president” and “vice president” in that order—plan to dismember and privatize the USPS, which has been independent of presidential control since the great postal strike of 1970 forced wide-ranging reforms.
The crowd’s repeated response to the dismemberment/privatization threat: “Hell no!”
The Musk-Trump plan would turn over profitable parts of the USPS—cities and inner suburbs—to the private sector, such as Amazon, FedEx and UPS. The rest of the U.S. would have to shift for itself.
“The Postal Service would be under the Commerce Department and there would be destruction of it as an independent agency serving everyone, Renfroe declared. “Hell no!” the crowd responded.
“This is a direct attack on the 640,000 postal workers,” Renfroe explained. “It would threaten the jobs of every single one of them.” Renfroe noted that includes 73,000 veterans. Left unsaid: The USPS is a prime employer, and a route into the middle class, for women and people of color.
Dismembering and privatizing the USPS also violates the U.S. Constitution. The service and its Post Office predecessor predate that founding document, and postal service is included in it by name. As a result, the USPS celebrates its 250th anniversary next year. Trump’s present, said Postal Workers (APWU) President Mark Dimondstein, “is to kill you!” The privatizers, Renfroe added, “want to create an unreliable, inefficient and expensive postal service.”
Even Trump voters “didn’t vote for destruction,” Renfroe commented.
Other speakers slammed the profit motives of Musk, Trump and the privatizers—motives Trump floated during his first term. Then, he named GOP big giver and XPO Logistics CEO Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General, with a mandate to cut jobs, “modernize” the USPS by trashing its contracts and ready it for privatization. DeJoy, who is stepping down this year, slowed service, too.
“Trump and his wealthy allies will do anything to benefit themselves, despite terrible consequences for the rest of us,” said another union leader, Communications Workers President Claude Cummings. Added AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department President Greg Regan, “They’re trying to dismantle the fabric of our society.”
But “one of the institutions which they can’t dismantle is the American labor movement,” which is fighting back, Regan added. And AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond said the federation’s 63 unions all back the Letter Carriers and other postal unions in their fight against Musk and Trump.
Much of that union fight back, so far, has been in the courts. Notable recent developments in judicial chambers included:
- On February 20, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, in D.C., rejected a lawsuit by the Government Employees, AFSCME and other unions demanding an injunction to block the Musk-Trump mass layoffs of government workers. The judge said the unions had to follow an appeals process within the federal government first, before they could go to court.
Photo via AFL-CIO
“Judges are duty-bound to decide legal issues based on even-handed application of law and precedent–no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people,” Judge Cooper, a Barack Obama appointee, said.
- Those same two unions, several locals and two public interest groups got a temporary restraining order on February 24 from U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Md., to stop Musk, Trump and the 22-year-old computer nerds of Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” from seizing and pillaging through personal and financial records of millions of people. The pillage opens the records to Musk to exploit.
- That same day, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Greenbelt barred the Department of Homeland Security—where Chuang was deputy general counsel until Obama appointed him to be a federal judge—from letting Trump’s ICE agents invade houses of worship to arrest people. The Agents grabbed anyone brown, be they migrant or native.
Judge Chuang said the raids violated the Constitution’s 1st Amendment freedom of religion, and federal law, too.
- Trump staffers won and freedom of the press, another part of the 1st Amendment, lost, at least temporarily to Trump-named U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, in U.S. District Court in D.C. The judge let stand—for now–Trump’s ejection of the Associated Press, the world’s largest and most-respected news organization, from the White House.
Trump threw out the AP because it refused to change its stylebook, which news organizations use worldwide, and adopt Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” News organizations, led by AP, and including the News Guild in a friend-of-the-court brief, stood up for AP. But while Judge McFadden rejected AP’s request for a temporary restraining order against three top Trump staffers, he scheduled a hearing next month on the underlying 1st Amendment issue.
- In symbolic defiance, Yosemite National Park workers ascended its prime tourist attraction, El Capitan on February 24, and hung a large U.S. flag upside down from it. That’s a widely recognized symbol of distress. They protested Musk-Trump firings in the park and throughout the National Park Service. The Interior Department later reversed the firings.
Michael Pfleger, the Catholic priest of St. Sabina’s church on Chicago’s South Side, raised the flag upside down, too, to protest looming Republican cuts in Medicare and especially Medicaid which would harm his parishioners.
- At the SAG-AFTRA awards on February 23, Jane Fonda, 87, accepted a lifetime achievement award with a blast at Trump—though she didn’t say his name—and a call to arms for her Hollywood colleagues to oppose him.
“What we, actors, create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls. And make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke. By the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people,” said Fonda.
Back at the D.C. rally, speakers forecast privatization would produce massive delivery dislocations, not just of letters, but of food, medicines, clothes and other goods—including those bought on line, even from Amazon.
That’s because, in rural areas like Renfroe’s home state of Mississippi, the Delaware River Valley or the entire state of Utah except for Ogden and Salt Lake City, even the private package services rely on the USPS’s universal network to deliver their goods “the last mile.”
“We have such huge rural areas, and they become forgotten by private corporations” in pursuit of profits, explained Letter Carrier Tom DeGarlais of Ogden. He had planned to bring his sign from the February 17 mass grass-roots protests against all other Musk-Trump cuts to the D.C. rally. But it was too big to fit in the airplane’s luggage bins. He showed a photo of it on his phone.
The sign on stiff white posterboard featured photos of Trump Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump and Musk, in that order, under three words in capital letters: “FRAUD” “WASTE” “ABUSE”.
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