News
Trump’s USPS Takeover Plan a ‘Reckless Power Grab’ Endangering Mail-In Voting: Critics
President Donald Trump is expected to announce plans to take over the U.S. Postal Service, an independent agency that has its roots in the U.S. Constitution, and absorb it into the Commerce Department. Congress, not the executive branch, has primary control over the USPS, although the president nominates members of the USPS Board of Governors, who must receive Senate confirmation.
Critics are calling it a “reckless power grab” and warning that it could disenfranchise the millions of Americans — nearly half of all voters — who vote by mail, and threatens to disrupt the lives of millions of Americans, especially seniors, veterans, and rural residents, who receive “about a billion shipments of prescription drugs” through the mail.
According to The Washington Post, which first broke the story, the move “would probably violate federal law,” and throw “the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.”
For decades, Republicans have wanted to privatize the USPS, at one point restructuring it and forcing it to effectively “bank” a continuous 50 years’ worth of pension and health care funding, something no other agency has ever been required to do. Calling the Postal Service “essential,” President Joe Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022—legislation that passed with massive bipartisan support—which eliminated the pre-funding requirement, providing the agency with far greater stabilization.
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President Trump for years has blasted the Postal Service, and weaponized his criticism into attacks on Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, one of his prominent critics. (Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, more recently has appeared to adopt a more supportive tone.) Amazon is one of the top customers of the Postal Service, and Trump tried to force the USPS to increase the rates that the company, one of the nation’s top retailers, has to pay.
Trump in 2018, for example, wrongly claimed that “the Post Office is losing billions of dollars … because it delivers packages for Amazon at a very below cost,” Factcheck.org reported. “He also said taxpayers are ‘subsidizing’ Amazon’s deliveries, but the U.S. Postal Service does not receive any federal funds for its operating costs and hasn’t since 1982.”
The Postal Service’s governing board, “is planning to fight Trump’s order, three of those people told The Washington Post,” the paper reported. “In an emergency meeting Thursday, the board retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency’s independent status.”
“This is a somewhat regal approach that says the king knows better than his subjects and he will do his best for them. But it also removes any sense that there’s oversight, impartiality and fairness and that some states wouldn’t be treated better than other states or cities better than other cities,” James O’Rourke, who studies the Postal Service at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, told the Post. “The anxiety over the Postal Service is not only three-quarters of a million workers. It’s that this is something that does not belong to the president or the White House. It belongs to the American people.”
CRITICS RESPOND
Critics immediately blasted President Trump upon hearing news of his plans to take over the Postal Service.
“Now he’ll control mail-in voting. Right out of the autocrat’s playbook,” remarked journalist and author Craig Crawford.
“This is insane,” declared U.S. Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA). “Now Trump wants to seize the Postal Service, dismantle its independence, and throw mail delivery into chaos. This isn’t reform—it’s an incompetent, reckless power grab. We will use every tool at our disposal to fight back.”
“USPS, despite its faults, delivers hundreds of millions of pieces of mail on a *daily* basis, and as a small percentage of that volume, is also the literal backbone of our entire elections, voter registration, and political campaigning system in America,” observed Nick Lima, Registrar/Director of Elections for the City of Cranston, Rhode Island.
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“Taking over the USPS would be plainly contrary to the 1970 Postal Service law. Is the President is betting he can do it and that Congress will do nothing & that maybe the SCOTUS will declare the 1970 statute’s method of appointing the PMG [Postmaster General] unconstitutional?” noted Dr. Kevin R. Kosar, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies the U.S. Congress, the administrative state, American politics, election reform, and the U.S. Postal Service.
“The Postal Service is one of the largest employers of Veterans in the country. Hundreds of thousands of Veterans rely on USPS to deliver medications, benefits, and critical information. We won’t stand by and let this happen. We WILL fight this!” announced the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets.
TRUMP, COVID, AND THE USPS
During the summer of 2020, during President Trump’s first term, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, many more Americans turned to the Postal Service to obtain their prescription medications.
Documenting that phenomenon, Popular Science, citing Michael Pignone, a doctor in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas’s Dell Medical School, reported that the USPS is “part of the healthcare system.”
“You can think of the post office as just this incredibly well-distributed last-mile logistics network,” Pignone said. “There are all kinds of possibilities of what the postal service can do.”
WIRED magazine, also in 2020, reported on the ” little-known Postal Plan, which dates back to the Clinton era,” that “charges mail carriers with delivering critical supplies—like vaccines—as a last resort.” It also cited “a little-known Obama administration plan, ‘Executive Order 13527: Medical Countermeasures Following a Biological Attack,'” where “it would fall to the Postal Service to be the first-line responders to a widespread biological terror incident—think an anthrax attack, where the post office shows up at your door with Cipro. Those plans could potentially be dusted off to help respond to disease epidemic or pandemic.”
In its report on Trump’s plans to take over the Postal Service, The Washington nPost also noted that “Republicans have grown wary of [outgoing Postmaster General] DeJoy and the Postal Service’s close ties to the Biden administration. The two partnered to deliver nearly 1 billion coronavirus test kits, the largest expansion of postal capabilities in a generation, and to fund a fleet of more than 60,000 electric mail delivery vehicles, though those were plagued by delivery delays.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump had one of the worst responses compared to other similar nations. He infamously begged officials to slow down testing for the coronavirus, and said, “by having more tests, we have more cases.”
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Image via Reuters
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U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) is accusing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents of pepper-spraying her in her face while she was at a local Tucson, Arizona restaurant.
Rep. Grijalva in a video on social media said she saw about 40 mostly-masked ICE agents at a restaurant she frequents weekly.
The agents were “in several vehicles that the community had stopped right here, right in the middle of the street, because they were afraid that they were taking people without due process, without any kind of notice.”
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She said that the community was “protecting their people” when she was “sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent,” and “pushed around by others when I literally was not being aggressive.”
“I was asking for clarification, which is my right as a member of Congress,” she continued. “So, once I introduced myself, once I did, I assumed that it would be a little calmer, but there was literally only one person that was trying to speak to me in any kind of civil tone, and everyone else was being rude and disrespectful, and I just can only imagine if they’re going to treat me like that, how they’re treating everybody else.”
Congresswoman Grijalva said she saw “people directly sprayed,” including “members of our press” and staff members.
She blasted President Donald Trump, saying that he “has no regard for any due process, the rule of law, the Constitution — they’re literally disappearing people from the streets.”
Critics slammed the agents’ action.
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U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) wrote that Rep. Grijalva “was doing her job, standing up for her community.”
“Pepper-spraying a sitting member of Congress is disgraceful, unacceptable, and absolutely not what we voted for. Period,” he added.
“This is unacceptable and outrageous,” observed Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes. “Enforcing the rule [of] law does not mean pepper spraying a member of Congress for simply asking questions. Effective law enforcement requires restraint and accountability, not unchecked aggression.”
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein noted, “quite the beginning for Grijalva, who wasn’t seated for weeks, [cast] the decisive vote to get the Epstein files, and now has apparently been pepper sprayed in the face by immigration agents.”
Also calling the action “outrageous,” U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) wrote: “We are Members of Congress with oversight authority of ICE. Rep Grijalva was completely within her rights to stand up for her constituents. ICE is completely lawless.”
“First they tackle a sitting Senator,” noted U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY). “Now they’re pepper spraying a Representative. It’s clear ICE is spinning out of control. We will hold the agency accountable.”
ICE just conducted a raid by Taco Giro in Tucson – a small mom-and-pop restaurant that has served our community for years.
When I presented myself as a Member of Congress asking for more information, I was pushed-aside and pepper sprayed. pic.twitter.com/gPx0p3IXP2
— Rep. Adelita Grijalva (@Rep_Grijalva) December 5, 2025
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Image via Reuters
A well-known conservative commentator has a warning for the Republican Party: take action now or face a repeat of the 2018 midterms when the GOP lost 41 House seats in a landslide. And this time, he says, the Senate could go to the Democrats as well.
Award-winning writer and journalist Bernard Goldberg reminded readers at The Hill that in 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term, “Republicans got walloped … and a good chunk of that had President Trump’s name written all over it.”
Trump’s “approval ratings were in the low 40s, and independents — the folks who usually decide elections — had seen enough. They broke hard for the Democrats,” Goldberg noted. “Now here we are, staring down 2026, and you can almost hear history clearing its throat, getting ready to repeat itself.”
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Goldberg noted that Trump’s approval rating is currently the lowest it’s been this term.
“Among Republicans, his support dropped from 91 percent right after the 2024 election to 84 percent last month. Among independents, it cratered — from 42 percent to just 25 percent.”
“If the trend continues,” he warned, “Republicans could be headed for another blue wave — and this time, it could wash away not just the House majority, but control of the Senate too.”
Why?
“It’s the economy — still,” he wrote.
“Trump is out there saying the economy is humming. Biden said the same thing before him. But voters didn’t buy it then, and they’re not buying it now. Why? Because it’s not GDP numbers that matter. It’s affordability,” Goldberg noted.
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That’s a word that President Trump continues to call a “con job,” while his own administration tries to claim he is focused on.
He pointed to a Karl Rove Wall Street Journal column and wrote: “The Republicans may have ‘avoided disaster’ in Tennessee, but the result should be a wake-up call for Republicans. He’s right.”
Goldberg asked: “will anyone in the Republican Party actually pick up the phone?”
“Because if Republicans don’t wake up — and fast — they’re going to find out the hard way what happens when you keep rerunning the same movie and expecting a different ending. To lose in 2026, all they have to do is nothing. And right now, that’s pretty much what they’re doing.”
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President Donald Trump is claiming that the top priority of Democrats is the “total obliteration” of the U.S. Supreme Court. His remarks came just hours after SCOTUS gave Republicans a 6-3 win along partisan lines, in the form of approving Texas’s redrawn mid-decade congressional maps that could help add five GOP-held seats to the U.S. House of Representatives. A lower court had ruled the redrawn Texas maps were likely racially biased.
Although there are different ways to measure, one study by Court Accountability this fall found that the Supreme Court has ruled in Trump’s favor 90% of the time.
“Most of these wins for the president came from the court’s ‘shadow docket’ slate of opinions — where the court has typically, in the past, only ruled on administrative measures,” according to Truthout. “However, in recent years, the Supreme Court has been making announcements on cases, issuing injunctions or allowances of actions to remain in place, that have the same effect, essentially, as a final decision.”
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On Friday, the president declared that the “Democrats number one policy push is the complete and total OBLITERATION of our great United States Supreme Court.”
“They will do this on their very first day in office, through the simple Termination of the Filibuster, SHOULD THEY WIN THE UPCOMING ELECTIONS,” he wrote.
Trump has strongly advocated for Republicans to eliminate the Senate filibuster.
“The Radical Left Democrats are looking at 21 Justices, with immediate ascension,” he wrote, claiming that Democrats would more than double the current size of the court.
“This would be terrible for our Country. Fear not, however, Republicans will not let it, or any of their other catastrophic policies, happen. Our Country is now in very good hands. MAGA!!!”
Some court reform advocates have suggested the Supreme Court be expanded to 13 justices, one for each of the thirteen U.S. Courts of Appeals.
READ MORE: Trump’s Ballroom Seen as ‘Key Evidence’ He’s Out of Touch as Cost of Living Spikes
Image via Reuters
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