WASHINGTON — After decades as an independent agency, the U.S. Postal Service could soon face a radical change under the Trump administration. Last month, President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he was considering ending the agency’s independent status, saying he wants a U.S. Postal Service “that doesn’t lose massive amounts of money.”

“It'll be a form of a merger, but it'll remain the Postal Service, and I think it'll operate a lot better than it has been over the years. It's been — it's just a tremendous loser for this country,” Trump argued. The president’s billionaire ally, Elon Musk, has suggested going even further and privatizing the service.

That set off alarm bells for Rep. Laura Friedman, D-Calif., who stressed the impacts a private mail system could have on election integrity. In California alone, 80.76% of all ballots cast in the November 2024 election were cast by mail. 

“The ballots need to stay in public hands where it's traceable, where there's accountability, where there's elected representatives who can be held accountable if something goes wrong. If you put people's ballots into completely private hands, I think that's very concerning,” Friedman said in an interview with Spectrum News.

“We would be trusting people's ballots to an unelected, unaccountable group of people. You know, the bottom line is that the Postal Service should be there to serve the people, not to serve somebody’s profit margins,” she added.

Howard Schweber, a constitutional scholar at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said that while it's still speculative, privatizing the post office could run the risk of damaging the integrity of elections not by destroying or harboring ballots, but by leaving out areas entirely by just cutting down the service’s footprint.

“The more likely scenario is just less service in certain areas based on efficiency and profitability. To ask what the consequences of that might be, particularly in states that have imposed strict deadlines on voting, a lot of the measures we've seen in recent years, and some of these are still being contested, say things like absentee ballots shouldn't be counted if they don't arrive exactly on the right day, or if they're not filled out in exactly the right way. So you could have an effect on absentee voting just by differentials in service,” he pointed out.

In 2024, the postal service had a $79.5 billion operating revenue, but incurred $9.5 billion in losses. Those losses are in part due to the Postal Service’s commitment to deliver mail to every community — no matter how small or remote. Schweber said the U.S. has already seen how deregulation or privatization of a government service can lead to a lack of rural service in the airline industry.

“They stopped being under a legal obligation to serve rural airports. And a lot of rural airports lost flights. To the point where some places have no flights going in and out anymore. So this is not hypothetical,” he said.

Last week, a group of 160 House Democrats sent a letter urging President Trump to leave the postal service alone. 

“Privatizing the Postal Service would have real-world consequences for our constituents, pricing many of them out of access to this essential service that has been a critical part of our nation’s history since before its founding,” they wrote. 

The Postal Service was created in 1775 by the Second Continental Congress, and in the Constitution, under Article 1, Section 8, the founders granted Congress the power "to establish post offices and post roads," which is also known as "Postal Power" or the "Postal Clause."

Schweber said while there is no constitutional barrier to privatizing the post office, any move by the president to do so would likely be challenged in court — though it’s anyone’s guess how successful that legal challenge would be, especially if it rested on Americans' rights to access voting via mail.

“The Constitution authorizes Congress to create a post office. It doesn't require it to do so or say how it is done,” reasoned Schweber. “In recent years, the Roberts Supreme Court has made it clear that they will not intervene to protect voting rights in general. There was a case involving gerrymandering where they said, ‘yes, political gerrymandering, as opposed to racial gerrymandering, may have the effect of forcing people's votes not to count. But that's not something we can have any comment on.’ They've said that second generation barriers — that is things like voter ID laws — don't raise any constitutional questions.”

The court, according to Schweber, has essentially greenlit efforts by the Trump administration and other previous administrations to “adopt policies that have the effect of limiting people’s ability to vote.”

“As the courts interpreted, the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to vote. It only prohibits states from certain race-specific steps to prevent people from voting,” Schweber continued. “As long as you don't have a racially discriminatory law that prevents people voting formally on its face on the basis of their race, pretty much according to this Supreme Court, anything goes.”

While the country waits to see what move President Trump makes, Rep. Friedman is still working on getting answers from the post office for her constituents and those in the greater-Los Angeles area who have been impacted by the wildfires earlier this year and are therefore unable to get mail to their homes. She also fears she would not be able to seek oversight of the postal service if Trump follows Musk’s suggestion.

“We were able to go to the post office and say we're elected representatives of the people. We need more service to deal with the fire victims. And guess what? They added the service. A private company wouldn't have to do that,” Friedman pointed out. “I don't like the idea of the money that people pay for their mail, going to shareholders and going into somebody's profit. All that money should go back into making the Postal Service better for our constituents.”