Liberty vs. the (Labor) Leviathan: The Unions Standing Between You and a Post Office That Works

Last month, postal workers lined the streets outside branches from Miami to Richmond to a stretch of Route 273 near New Castle, Delaware, waving signs that read “Protect Our Public Post Office” and chanting “the mail is not for sale.”

It was the American Postal Workers Union’s “National Day of Action to Protect Our Public Post Office,” and it followed the same script we’ve seen for years: any attempt to change how the Postal Service does business gets treated as an existential threat, and the response is the same playbook of rallies, ad campaigns, and dire warnings, regardless of what’s actually being proposed.

Here’s what the union rhetoric leaves out: the Postal Service is not a healthy institution being raided by outside interests. It is an agency that has lost $118 billion since 2007, that hit its $15 billion borrowing limit from the Treasury with nowhere left to turn, and whose own Postmaster General, David Steiner, has told Congress it will run out of cash by early 2027 without action. USPS posted a $1.95 billion loss last quarter alone, marking its fifth straight quarterly loss. Steiner isn’t a “privatization ideologue;” he’s the man running the place, and he’s the one telling Congress the current model is broken.

Steiner’s requests sit alongside a case I made last year: USPS should stay laser-focused on what it does better than anyone—final mile delivery to every mailbox in America—while shedding upstream work, like presortation, long-haul transport, and IT infrastructure, that the private sector can already do more efficiently through partnerships. That model doesn’t touch a single letter carrier’s job. It protects rural service. It could save the Postal Service tens of billions of dollars a year that it doesn’t have.

None of that stops the union machine from treating every version of “reform,” whether it’s Steiner’s request, a workshare model, or the more sweeping restructuring occasionally floated out of Washington, as one and the same: a corporate takeover of the mail. That flattening isn’t an accident. It’s a fundraising and mobilization strategy, and it works because “save the post office” polls a lot better than “extend the Postal Service’s line of credit.”

There’s a tell in all of this, and it showed up close to home. Organizers of a recent recall campaign against Governor Landry have held signature-gathering events at libraries, cafes, churches, and, in New Orleans, at the American Postal Workers Union hall on Old Gentilly Road. Rural signature drives have used the post office itself as a venue, notably the Rayville Post Office named after my late friend Luke Letlow. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not really about the mail. It’s a reminder that the postal unions have become general-purpose infrastructure for a broader coalition that resists market accountability wherever it surfaces, whether that’s a Postmaster General in DC or a governor in Baton Rouge.

This institutional bloat is preventing the Postal Service from making the meaningful cost reductions needed to align its operations with current demand. Labor accounts for more than two-thirds of USPS’s expenses, yet the organization employs roughly the same number of workers today as it did two decades ago, when mail volume was nearly twice as high. Many postal positions are essential, particularly delivery-related roles, which comprise more than half of the workforce and support a growing number of delivery points nationwide. But for non-delivery functions, USPS can better align staffing levels with its current mail and package workload through natural attrition.

Rural Louisianans have the most to lose if USPS runs out of cash in 2027, and the most to gain if Congress finally passes reforms that put it on stable footing instead of another temporary bailout. The way forward is to protect the Postal Service’s universal service obligation, which remains critical today, by making changes to the Postal Service’s business to allow it to operate more efficiently and effectively. The Postal Service does have a critical mission to deliver to every American. To better fulfill that mission, USPS should focus its resources on core delivery operations, improve service performance, and leverage private-sector partners for functions where they can reduce costs and increase efficiency.

The Leviathan doesn’t always look like a bureaucrat with a rulebook. Sometimes it looks like a 250-year-old institution defending its own dysfunction by borrowing the language of solidarity, and mobilizing genuinely good, hardworking people to block the very reforms that would keep their jobs secure for the next generation. Congress should tune out the noise, ignore the false choice between “sell the mail” and “change nothing,” and pass the kind of pragmatic, reform can secure the postal service into the future.