The Trump administration's talk of transforming the U.S. Postal Service has ensnared another one of the country's oldest institutions — the census.
During a recent interview, Fox News anchor Bret Baier asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick about a potential push for his department to take control of the USPS — even though Congress set up the Postal Service to be independent of the White House and generally self-funded through stamp sales and other service fees.
President Trump gave Lutnick "a whole 24 hours," the commerce secretary said, to figure out how to solve the mail service's longstanding financial problems. To "save us money," the solution Lutnick pitched was to rely on mail carriers instead of hiring temporary census workers to help conduct the constitutionally required head count of the country's residents once every 10 years.
"Can you imagine saying to your postman, 'Can you count the people in the house?' " said Lutnick, who heads the Census Bureau's parent agency.
It's a question some members of Congress, mainly Republicans, have floated for decades, prompting studies by the bureau and the Government Accountability Office that ultimately concluded that adding this census work to the Postal Service's responsibilities would not be cost-effective or as easy as it may seem.
The idea's recent resurfacing — as Trump suggests a "form of a merger" between the USPS and the Commerce Department — is now raising concerns about disruptions to the country's mail service and to plans for the 2030 census, which is set to be used to redistribute political representation and federal funding to communities in the coming decade.
Lutnick's proposal faces major legal and logistical hurdles, experts say
Mail carriers have played a key role in the national tally going back to 1960, when the Census Bureau first used the mail extensively to deliver questionnaires for households to fill out.
But until now, public calls to increase collaboration between the two agencies had not come with the idea of folding the USPS into the Commerce Department. Such a unilateral move by the president would violate the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, says Rena Steinzor, an administrative law expert who retired last year as a professor at the University of Maryland's law school.
"The law is crystal clear on this point," Steinzor says. "Trying to take it over, to pull it into the Commerce Department and get rid, in essence, of its independent structure would not be legal without the consent of Congress."
Still, Trump has been attempting to expand his power over other independent agencies, and it's unclear what exactly Lutnick envisions for his proposal to expand the Postal Service's census role. The Commerce Department's public affairs office has not responded to NPR's interview request. The USPS also didn't reply to a request for comment.
Based on Lutnick's public comments so far, Terri Ann Lowenthal, a census consultant who once served as staff director of the former House oversight subcommittee on the census and the Postal Service, is skeptical.
"I think that looking to the Postal Service as a replacement for the Census Bureau and census takers is an effort to find a silver bullet that just doesn't exist," Lowenthal says. "The cost savings that Secretary Lutnick believes might be there for the taking simply are based on wildly inaccurate numbers and assumptions."
For example, the 2020 census cost $13.7 billion, about a third of the $40 billion Lutnick cited in the interview as the cost he claimed the federal government could save.
In 2011, the GAO concluded that using mail carriers to interview households for the census "would not be cost-effective." The watchdog agency's report pointed to higher average wage rates for mail carriers compared to those for temporary census workers, as well as the large number of hours needed to follow up with households that don't respond to the census on their own.
There are also logistical mismatches. With the cluster mailboxes often found in apartment buildings becoming more common in new subdivisions, many carriers' mail routes don't include door-to-door stops, says Chris Mihm, a retired managing director for strategic issues at the GAO, who tracked the census for decades.
"Mail is obviously, in most cases, delivered during the day, in the middle of the day. That's not the peak time for doing follow-up on census forms that are not returned," adds Mihm, noting that the bureau trains its door knockers to visit households when they're more likely to be home, such as in the early evening or during weekend afternoons.
In rural areas, where homes can be spread far apart, trying to squeeze census interviews into a regular day for mail carriers could be a "pretty large ask," warns Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, one of the two mail carrier unions.
"Certainly the rural carrier is not going to be able to deliver their assigned duties for the day and also accomplish a second job because they just simply don't have the time," Maston says. "They're under the gun to get back to the post office at a reasonable time."
Many postal watchers fear the census proposal is covering up privatization plans
For Mihm, the retired GAO official, any talk about more census work for mail carriers doesn't address the "real" problem facing the Postal Service — its outdated business model for funding a universal service obligation of delivering mail to almost every address in the country six days a week.
Since 2009, its troubled finances have kept the USPS on the GAO's "high risk list" of parts of the federal government that are seriously vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement. The agency's latest warning, out last month, says the Postal Service is likely to face more declines in its most profitable kind of mail (first-class) and more competition from private package delivery companies while also dealing with rising expenses and unfunded liabilities driven by health and pension benefits for its retired workers.
Still, the USPS ended this fiscal year's first quarter with a $144 million surplus, compared to the $2.1 billion net loss for the same period last year. The USPS says the turnaround is in large part the result of a controversial 10-year reorganization plan Postmaster General Louis DeJoy rolled out in 2021.
The heads of the three USPS employee unions that NPR spoke with say they're open to ideas for rethinking the services the agency can provide, including interviewing households for the census.
"If the Commerce Department wants us to get more involved with some of their work, bring it on," says Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union. "But the people of this country should not be fooled by nice-sounding ideas of doing a census, as if somehow that's a basis or legitimate reason to do a hostile takeover" by the Trump administration.
While Brian Renfroe — president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, which represents carriers in cities — showed support in an X post for Lutnick's suggestion to add more census work to letter carriers' responsibilities, he tells NPR that he is still concerned that neither the commerce secretary nor Trump has publicly denied that the administration is considering an attempt to change the independent status of the USPS.
"It remains a threat as long as it's under consideration," Renfroe says.
The unions fear that a Trump administration takeover could result in privatizing at least some part of the USPS, a direction that Trump said at a December press conference was "not the worst idea" he's ever heard.
That kind of transformation would likely lead to reduced mail service to rural areas and higher shipping costs for the public, says Chris Wetherbee, a transportation analyst with Wells Fargo, who recently co-authored a report exploring the implications of splitting off and selling the package side of the Postal Service from its mail business.
"Just going in there and being able to reduce service levels pretty meaningfully or change materially how mail is delivered in this country is not a particularly easy thing. And I'm not sure it's something that people have a ton of appetite for in Washington," adds Wetherbee.
And it may be difficult even for Trump to rally support among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Six voting House Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors of a resolution that Congress "should take all appropriate measures" to make sure the USPS remains an independent government agency and "not subject to privatization."
Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, sees a "less disruptive" path Trump could take to influence the Postal Service, whose politically appointed governing board currently has four Biden nominees, two Trump nominees and three open seats.
"There is opportunity for the current administration to put some people on the Board of Governors and have some oversight from that level and without completely flipping the applecart upside down, so to speak," Maston says.
The postal governors are set to pick a replacement for DeJoy, who recently announced plans to step down. The White House's press office has not responded to a request for comment on whether Trump is considering making any nominations for governors.
Edited by Benjamin Swasey
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