President Trump is making plans to disband the governing board that oversees the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the agency into his administration, throwing the future of the mail provider’s quasigovernmental status into doubt.

Trump is preparing to issue an executive order, possibly this week, to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and put the agency under the direct control of the Commerce Department, according to two government officials. The plan was earlier reported by the Washington Post late Thursday.

The Postal Service board is expected to fight the move and is exploring legal action, one official said. It couldn’t be determined whether the board would be able to stop the order because its members are appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate.

The plans renew questions over the future of the 250-year-old Postal Service. In December, Trump, when he was then president-elect, said at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida that he was thinking about privatizing the agency, a move he frequently pushed for during his first term. 

This week, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said he would step down after five years into a 10-year term. According to two officials, the Trump White House had been considering replacing DeJoy, a former logistics executive who was appointed during Trump’s first term in 2020.

A White House official denied that such an order was in the works. The Postal Service declined to comment, and the secretary to the governing board didn’t respond to a request for comment. Some Democrats in Congress swiftly condemned the expected Trump order. “The U.S. Postal Service is wildly popular with the American people, and its service is essential and irreplaceable,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D., Va.), who added that the Postal Service’s status as an independent agency had been established by Congress. “Nobody voted for this. It is brazenly illegal, unconstitutional and corrupt.”

The first Trump administration attempted to privatize the Postal Service as part of a broader plan to reorganize the federal government, a step it said would cut costs and give the financially burdened agency greater flexibility in adjusting to the digital age. Labor unions protested, and the proposal failed to gain support in Congress. 

“If the rumors are true, firing the Postal Service’s Board of Governors and transferring control is an outrageous and unlawful hostile takeover, essentially a raid on an independently operated public institution,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents more than 200,000 employees and retirees. Any move toward privatizing the Postal Service would result in higher rates and more post office closures, he added.

The Postal Service has been hemorrhaging money for years because of declining mail volumes, limits on what it can charge customers, and a costly mandate to deliver to around 168 million delivery addresses six days a week. Until 2022, it was also required to prefund its retiree health benefits.

The mail provider employs more than 600,000 people to staff post offices in every ZIP Code, and deliver millions of pieces of mail and parcels each week, including medications and e-commerce packages.

For the 2024 fiscal year, the agency reported a net loss of $9.5 billion, which, after adjusting for workers’ compensation and retirement liabilities, resulted in a controllable loss of $1.8 billion. With almost no funding from the federal government, the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, products and other services to fund its operations. 

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