USPS head agrees to let DOGE find ‘efficiencies’ — with limits to employee data access

The head of the U.S. Postal Service has agreed to allow the DOGE team of President Trump’s billionaire adviser Elon Musk to help find “further efficiencies” at the country’s mail service, according to a letter to congressional leaders released Thursday.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy signed the agreement with DOGE Wednesday night, the outgoing USPS head confirmed in the letter, noting that the Postal Service — which has been undergoing a controversial 10-year reorganization since 2021 to try to right its troubled finances — is “happy to have others to assist us in our worthwhile cause.”

Leaders of two USPS employee unions tell NPR that DeJoy assured them there are provisions in the agreement that prevent members of Musk’s team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, from having unfettered access to information in the records of the Postal Service’s more than half-million employees. NPR has not reviewed the agreement.

“We are very much in support of that type of protection, assuming that they comply with it,” Brian Renfroe — president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, the union for carriers in cities — tells NPR. “There’s reason for skepticism based on what we’ve seen from some of the other federal agencies.”

Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, says in a statement to NPR that the union representing postal clerks and other USPS employees “will use everything in our power, including every legal tool, to ensure that data related to employee information and information on individual customers remains private and out of the hands of Elon Musk and his Muskrats.”

Spokespeople for DOGE and the USPS did not respond to requests for comment on the agreement’s provisions.

It’s not clear what DOGE will try to do while the USPS continues its “self-help” strategies

This new arrangement comes as the Trump administration faces more than a dozen lawsuits over DOGE’s access to data at other federal agencies amid a push to slash the U.S. government workforce and programs.

Until now, there had been no public sign that DOGE’s efforts had reached the Postal Service. In recent months, however, Trump and his officials have suggested transforming the USPS, including expressing support for privatizing the service and proposing to fold what Congress set up to be an independent agency into the Commerce Department, a move that would likely be challenged in court.

Those suggestions, along with Musk’s broad attempts to reshape the federal government, have drawn outcries from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia — the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, who released DeJoy’s letter — criticized the agreement DeJoy signed as a way to allow Musk to “infiltrate” the Postal Service.

“This capitulation will have catastrophic consequences for all Americans — especially those in rural and hard to reach areas — who rely on the Postal Service every day to deliver mail, medications, ballots, and more. Reliable mail delivery can’t just be reserved for MAGA supporters and Tesla owners,” Connolly said in a statement.

It’s not clear exactly what DOGE will try to do at the USPS. DeJoy’s letter emphasized that the Postal Service has been using “self-help” strategies to achieve “efficiency gains, cost savings and revenue growth.” Those include, the postmaster general noted, a voluntary early retirement program that was first announced in mid-January to Postal Service employees. The program is expected to reduce the USPS labor workforce by an additional 10,000 people in the next 30 days after an earlier loss of about 30,000 workers from fiscal year 2021.

Still, asked by DOGE representatives for “the big problems they can help” with, DeJoy said he gave them a list of “intractable” issues that he described as out of the Postal Service’s control and in the hands of Congress. One is a longstanding dispute over how the Office of Personnel Management calculates the Postal Service’s liabilities for pre-1970 pension benefits. DeJoy also pointed to the Postal Regulatory Commission, which Congress set up to monitor the USPS, as “an unnecessary agency” whose members “stand in the way of the timely and necessary changes required to succeed as a self-funded enterprise in a competitive environment.”

The postmaster general, who had been a top Trump donor before joining the USPS, has often tussled with the commission over its criticism of his reorganization plan. In a statement responding to DeJoy’s letter, the PRC says it “has done more than its part to help” the Postal Service while following the law to “ensure that USPS provides universal service to all Americans” and “safeguards fair competition in package markets by preventing the Postal Service from abusing its monopoly position.”

As for whether DOGE can make any progress on the challenges facing the USPS, Renfroe, president of the city mail carriers’ union, says he’s taking a “wait-and-see” approach.

“The way that the Postal Service accepts and processes and moves and delivers mail is incredibly complex,” Renfroe adds. “I think it would be completely unreasonable, based on what I know about the way DOGE looks at things, for them to really dig deep in the operations just because of the complexity of it.”

Edited by Benjamin Swasey