In recent weeks, the fate of the United States Postal Service (USPS), a revered and vital public institution, has been uncertain. Since the start of his second presidency, Donald Trump has launched major changes to the federal government. Along with billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the president has carried out widespread layoffs at agencies such as the Small Business Administration and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, with the purported goal of cutting costs and boosting efficiency. Now, Trump is turning his focus to the post office, an agency he has long been critical of and one that he may be privatizing.
In addition to delivering upwards of 343.5m pieces of mail and packages a day, the post office is responsible for administering official government forms such as passport applications, and providing banking services, such as money orders. As of 2025, it employs 640,000 people. Black people, in particular, make up 29% of its staff, while making up just 12% of the national workforce overall.
The Washington Post first reported that Trump is expected to take control of the USPS, likely signing an executive order in the coming weeks to place the independent agency under the Commerce department. With privatization, Trump would probably curtail postal services, said Arrion Brown, the national support services director for the American Postal Workers Union. “The privatization definitely would require less employees,” he said. “That would cut down on the number of postal jobs.”
Trump’s potential plans for the USPS could threaten the agency’s rich legacy of Black employment, from which generations of Black families have secured wealth and benefits through service. “The postal service workforce is more diverse racially [and] ethnically than the labor force in this country as a whole,” said Brian Renfro, national president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
The gains in the post office with regards to diversity aren’t accidental. One reason for the high rate of Black employment at the postal office is because the USPS recruits veterans, a large percentage of whom are Black, said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “They’re vetted and they’re trustworthy,” said Morrissey of veterans. “You don’t want somebody messing with mail. The consequences are harsh if somebody does that.”
Because of federal protections, the post office, like other federal agencies, also has less discrimination in hiring compared to private sector employment. Anti-discrimination language in USPS’s collective bargaining agreements promotes employee diversity, said Renfro. “Hundreds of thousands of good middle-class jobs have been offered to people all over the country, without regard to race or any other demographic [information]”.
A postal worker sorts mail circa 1955. Photograph: FPG/Getty Images Increased access to postal service employment means that Black families can access solid benefits, especially as generations have been “blocked from other ways of creating wealth”, said Morrissey. “The benefits matter a lot to African American communities because of historical barriers to wealth creation and access to financial security through health benefits,” she said. USPS also pays relatively well compared to other jobs that do not require a college degree, Morrissey added, given training and trust required for the job. USPS also has union-protected pay increases based on how long a person has been employed with the post office, Renfro noted. “It’s a place to really make a solid middle class career,” he said. “When we talk about collective bargaining rights being attacked, we’re talking about people’s ability to have a middle class career.”
Diversity in the postal service is also a direct result of “geographic diversity”, said Renfro. Many of the more than 33,000 post offices in the US are “heavily concentrated in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other urban areas”, regions where Black people are more likely to live and be employed from.
The wealth building relationship between Black Americans and the postal service dates back to the 19th century, says Phillip Rubio, a history professor at North Carolina A&T State University. In 1865, Congress passed a law allowing Black people to be employed as postal workers, reversing an 1802 bill that previously declared that mail carriers could only be “free white persons”. Formerly enslaved people then started “taking advantage of what was a patronage job”, said Rubio, who’s an expert on Black postal workers. “The way the postal service opens up to African Americans is [that] they open the door,” he said, adding: “The post office [was] attractive when so many private sector jobs were closed to [Black people].”
Black people who were already employed by the post office began helping other Black folks obtain jobs, including studying with them for the postal exam. In 1872, Congress revoked the Freedman’s Bureau Act, which provided labor contracts between freed Black people and landowners. With those opportunities gone, “[the postal office] becomes a means of wealth accumulation and transfer,” said Rubio, particularly for Black people in the south. “It becomes a means of higher education for them and their families, also for their children, [and] becomes an avenue to home ownership,” he said. Black people moving north during the great migration also found work at northern post offices in urban cities.
A postal worker delivers mail on Chicago’s South side in 1973. Photograph: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images In the 1940s, 14% of middle-class Black people were employed by the post office, according to research by the economists Leah Boustan and Robert Margo. Even still, Black employees were largely denied workplace advancement, including for clerk positions and other higher-ranking roles. Black postal workers, particularly in the south, fought to get into local unions and keep local branches from being segregated.
The civil rights movement of the 1960s contributed to improved conditions for Black people in the postal service. President John F Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 prohibited discrimination in the hiring of federal employees, with USPS offices across the country posting Equal Employment Opportunity posters and notices where employees could submit complaints. Black postal employees were also promoted to higher ranking jobs and elected to local and national leadership positions. From 1960 to 1966, USPS was the largest employer of Black people in the US, and by 1970, Black people were 2.5 times more likely to work for the post office than white people (the rate is higher in especially segregated cities). By the year 2000, Black postal employees workers were also in the top 25% of earners of Black workers in the US.
Today, the postal office’s legacy of diversity and equity are under threat. The tradition of career-long employment, where postal workers remain in service for several decades, could be eliminated as jobs across the board are slashed under privatisation. A reduction in jobs would mean “less middle, good paying, benefit jobs in Black communities”, said Brown, where several distribution centers are concentrated. Trump’s plans could rollback achievements for workers, specifically hard-fought benefits. “Lower wage, non-career employees” could be drafted into service, said Morrissey, versus workers with a long-term interest in postal service.
The ability to negotiate a contract is also a critical feature of the post office employment that could be eliminated, especially given Trump’s anti-union actions. The current postmaster general Louis DeJoy recently announced that he would be stepping down, which could result in Trump appointing a postmaster general who “refuses to recognize collective bargaining rights, either in part or in whole”, said Renfro. The agreement was a direct result of the 1970 postal strike, an eight-day, nationwide demonstration involving 200,000 workers who fought against low wages. Referring to a rollback of union protections, Renfro warned: “We have to be prepared for any attacks.”
Ultimately, such changes would not only affect the practicality and efficiency of the post office, and its benefits to millions of Americans, but specifically Black families, who’ve long depended on the institution for upward financial mobility. With privatization a likely outcome, Brown said, “We couldn’t make the argument in the Black community that postal jobs are safe, good, reliable jobs in the future.”