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Privatizing the Postal Service Would Hurt Rural Americans [1]
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Date: 2025-04-09
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
I have a deep appreciation of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that stems from my grandmother, the former postmaster of the Picture Rocks post office in rural Pennsylvania.
She oversaw the handling of all incoming and outgoing mail, managed employees, and kept the community connected to the rest of the world six days per week (this was a time before smartphones connected everyone to everything, all of the time).
In the 20th century, mail represented a great opportunity for rural households. As South Carolina congressman A. F. Lever put it in 1906, rural postal delivery was a “great university in which 36,000,000 of our people receive their daily lessons from the newspapers and magazines of the country. It is the schoolhouse of the American farmer, and is without a doubt one of the most potent educational factors of the time.”
While people certainly don’t send as many letters as they used to and readership of physical newspapers is nearly extinct, the USPS is still legally required to provide universal service to every address in the country, rural or urban. There are exceptions to this rule (some small towns only have the option to pay for a P.O. box), but in one way or another, Americans have the right to receive mail, serviced by their local post offices. The USPS is one of the rare examples of a government agency that actually touches the lives of most Americans on a regular basis, and is provided either completely free of charge or at low cost.
But this service is under attack by the Trump administration, which proposes privatizing the agency to address its precipitous plunge in profits in recent years.
Since the passage of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the USPS is expected to financially sustain itself through selling stamps and other mailing services. But this revenue has been insufficient to cover the agency’s expenses and debt for nearly two decades. USPS’ net loss for fiscal year 2024 was $9.5 billion, compared to a net loss of $6.5 billion the previous year. This $3 billion difference was because of an increase in “non-cash workers’ compensation expenses,” according to the agency.
President Donald Trump’s solution is to sell the agency to private mail delivery companies. But rural letter carriers say this would negatively affect rural communities who could be excluded from a private company’s service area because of the high cost of delivering to certain hard-to-get-to addresses, according to previous Daily Yonder reporting.
This means that for the first time in over a century, many rural addresses could be excluded from mail delivery if USPS is privatized.
This would have a myriad of effects on different people, but it could be particularly harmful to older folks in rural areas who still rely on paper mail to receive bills, voter registration, and other important notices. Other delivery services like prescriptions-by-mail could also be affected, which would have dire consequences for people who rely on this service.
The way we use mail has drastically changed over the past two decades because of the internet, so it’s no wonder the USPS has seen a dip in profits. But maybe – just maybe – the USPS doesn’t need to be profitable.
A version of the postal service has been around since before we were a country. Post offices were included in the Articles of Confederation, the first governmental framework that preceded the Constitution. They were also included in Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution, granting Congress the ability to “establish Post Offices and post Roads.”
The Founding Fathers knew the value of creating and maintaining a network of communication that connected rural and urban places to one another. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the USPS was required to be financially self-sufficient – an expectation that in the 21st century has proved to be unrealistic.
Under capitalism, a privatized USPS makes sense. But within the framework upon which this country was built some 250 years ago, where each colony would be unified through institutions like the post office, the idea of a capital-driven postal service starts to fall apart. It’s not profitable to maintain a system where every community big and small has the ability to send and receive mail, but we do it anyway, because it’s an American value.
And although our modes of communication have changed in the digital age, to me there’s nothing better than receiving a letter signed, stamped, and delivered, from my postmaster grandma.
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