Roll over Ben Franklin, Trump wants to get rid of USPS again

President-elect Donald Trump is once again hoping to get rid of one of Philadelphia’s best-known inventions: the United States Postal Office.

Trump raised the idea of privatizing the post office — founded in 1775 in Philadelphia with Franklin as its first Postmaster General — during a news conference Monday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

“Not the worst idea I ever heard,” Trump told reporters, resurrecting a failed proposal from his first term that met bipartisan rebuke. “It’s a lot different today between Amazon, UPS, FedEx and all the things you didn’t have. But there is talk about that — it’s an idea a lot of people have had for a long time. We’re looking at it.”

The comments came after the Washington Post reported last week that Trump had expressed a “keen interest” in overhauling the Postal Service to transition officials, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairs of his new “Department of Government Efficiency.”

Trump has long threatened to ax the nation’s mail agency, created in Independence Hall by the Second Continental Congress, and older than the nation itself.

During his first administration, he suggested implementing cost-cutting measures to the Postal Service before selling to the private sector. The idea went nowhere. The mail agency lost $9.5 billion last year, but it remains one of America’s most cherished agencies.

In his most recent comments, Trump did not discuss exactly how privatizing the mail agency could benefit customers. Or what the move would mean for the hundreds of thousands of federal employees — including nearly 7,000 mail carriers in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and the larger Mid-Atlantic region — that would be ushered out of government jobs.

“It would be a huge disservice to the customer to privatize it,” said Olivia Silva, president of the Philadelphia, Pa. Area American Postal Workers Union Local 89. “I don’t think Trump is doing it for the good of the customer. He’s a businessman. I think he’s doing it for the good of himself and other businessmen.”

Privatization would lead to confusion and chaos as the responsibility of carrying the mail would likely be split between a number of businesses, she said.

“Privatization would be under too many hands,” she Silva said. “The trust and sanctity of the mail would be lost.”

Obligated by the Founding Fathers to deliver mail to every address in the nation six days per week, the USPS is often the only mail delivery service for far-flung locales.

For Franklin, a man of myriad interests and responsibilities, the Postmaster General gig represented the pinnacle of his 40-year postal career. He had first been appointed postmaster of Philadelphia by the British in 1737, and then promoted to the colonies’ joint mail chief in 1753 — and was lauded for increasing the efficiency of the agency’s bookkeeping and delivery routes.

At the time, postmasters typically operated out of their homes. The colonial-themed B. Free Franklin Post Office, located in a building on Market Street that Franklin once owned, was not a post office in Revolutionary times, according to Independence National Historical Park. The building does contain a small postal museum, and sells stamps.

It remains the only Post office in the country that doesn’t fly the American flag. That’s because when Benjamin Franklin founded the Postal Service in Philadelphia his nearby neighbor Betsy Ross had not even stitched her famous flag yet.