DeJoy Lets DOGE Into the Postal Service—But Makes Them Leave the Chainsaw Outside

Louis DeJoy is letting DOGE into the Postal Service.

On Thursday, the Postmaster General told congressional leaders that he signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s cost-cutting operation, allowing it to help the USPS save money and remove bureaucratic bottlenecks, according to a copy of the letter obtained by TIME. “This is an effort aligned with our efforts,” DeJoy wrote, “as while we have accomplished a great deal, there is much more to be done.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But America’s most beloved and beleaguered government agency won’t be subject to the same hostile takeover as other federal departments. The Trump Administration has spared the Postal Service, an independent body that funds itself and has roughly 640,000 employees, from DOGE-inflicted pressure to shrink its workforce. 

Instead, DeJoy essentially sicced the Department of Government Efficiency on Congress. He assigned Musk’s adjutants to review what he describes as structural problems created by legislation passed in the 1970s. Referring to the Postal Reorganization Act, DeJoy said the agency’s retirement assets and  workers compensation program were “mismanaged” by other federal departments. He cited unfunded mandates imposed on the USPS that cost between $6 billion and $11 billion annually, such as offering six-day mail delivery and maintaining post offices in remote areas. Perhaps most controversially, he called the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service and approves price increases, an “unnecessary agency” that has lost the agency more than $50 billion. 

“The DOGE team was gracious enough to ask for the big problems that they can help us with,” DeJoy wrote to legislators. 

There is a certain irony to the DeJoy-DOGE arrangement. Since taking the helm in 2020, DeJoy has embarked on a 10-year plan to make the agency profitable and more efficient. He renegotiated contracts for air and ground transportation, saving the USPS $10 billion annually. He reduced the headquarters workforce by 20 percent, saving more than $200 million annually. He built new processing centers and centralized the delivery network. On Capitol Hill, he collaborated with Democrats and Republicans to rescind a 2006 law that required the USPS to pre-pay the next 50 years of health and retirement benefits for all of its employees—a rule that no other federal agency was forced to follow. Those changes led to the Postal Service making a $144 million profit in the final quarter of 2024, its first profitable period in years. Since then, he has done more to trim the USPS budget. Through a voluntary early retirement program launched in January, the agency is expected to shed 10,000 workers next month. 

In other words: DeJoy has been doing the purported work of DOGE before DOGE came around. 

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. The Postal Service still lags with on-time delivery and meeting its own service standards. DeJoy remains a controversial figure on both sides of the aisle; in December, he covered his ears during a House Oversight Committee hearing when a Republican member criticized his leadership of the agency.

Read more: Louis DeJoy’s Surprising Second Act

While DeJoy once predicted the USPS would break even by 2023, it lost $9.5 billion last year. Postal Service leaders argue they are only halfway through a ten-year plan. DeJoy’s transformations, they say, have put the agency on a path toward profitability, beating out FedEx and UPS, and preserving its ability to reach every American in every corner of the country. 

But DeJoy won’t be overseeing the effort much longer. Last month, he told the USPS Board of Governors to start looking for a successor, ending a five-year tenure running the agency through the COVID-19 pandemic, three elections that relied heavily on mail voting, and the implementation of a dramatic restructuring. 

It’s not clear what will come next for one of the only government agencies enshrined in the Constitution. President Donald Trump has floated proposals such as privatization and folding the USPS into the Commerce Department. Musk, for his part, has also called for privatizing the Post Office. “I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized,” he told a conference this month. 

That remains unlikely. Either of those moves would require congressional authorization, and there’s no indication that majorities in either chamber would support that kind of disruption to a popular government agency that delivers to more than 167 million addresses every day. 

A collaboration between DeJoy and DOGE could offer an alternative. As a logistics expert and major Trump donor before becoming Postmaster General, DeJoy has credibility with the Musk-led initiative that others don’t. Rather than work against them, he’s working with them. The endgame may be to convince Congress to save the USPS from alternatives that most would rather avoid. 

“Fixing a broken organization that had experienced close to $100 billion in losses and was projected to lose another $200 billion, without a bankruptcy proceeding, is a daunting task,” DeJoy wrote to lawmakers. “Fixing a heavily legislated and overly regulated organization as massive, important, cherished, misunderstood, and debated as the United States Postal Service, with such a broken business model, is even more difficult.”