The US Postal Service (USPS) will begin working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut costs. On Thursday, US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy signed an agreement with the Trump era organization, welcoming the agency’s infiltration, which other federal organizations have railed against in recent weeks. In a letter sent to Congress, DeJoy explained that DOGE will “assist” USPS “in identifying and achieving further efficiencies” within the operation. DeJoy praised DOGE by saying, the “team was gracious enough to ask for the big problems they can help us with. It has long been known that the Postal Service has a broken business model that was not financially sustainable without critically necessary and fundamental core change.” DeJoy was hired by President Trump in 2020 to head USPS as Postmaster General as it struggled financially through the pandemic. Under DeJoy’s leadership, USPS has already been slashing jobs since 2021. In the past four years, it has cut 30,000 jobs, and plans to make another drastic round of layoffs, cutting 10,000 more employees over the next month.  Last month, DeJoy announced plans to step down from his role, as Trump announced he would make sweeping changes to USPS. He mused about firing the board and allowing the Commerce Department to seize control. “We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money. And we’re thinking about doing that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office at the time.  Doing so would be a step towards privatizing the postal service, something Trump has previously talked about. But, despite the call for massive changes, USPS is the federal agency Americans view most favorably, second only to the National Parks Service. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 72% had a favorable view of the postal service.  In his letter, DeJoy pressed that USPS retirement assets and the Workers’ Compensation Program have been “mismanaged” and the Postal Regulatory Commission, an agency which helps ensure the Postal Service operates transparently, abides by the law, and sets fair rates “unnecessary”. The agency “has inflicted over $50 billion in damage to the Postal Service by administering defective pricing models and decades old bureaucratic processes that encumber the Postal Service,” DeJoy said. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the ranking member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was quick to push back on the move, issuing a statement that sharply criticised DeJoy’s decision to work with DOGE. “The only thing worse for the Postal Service than DeJoy’s ‘Delivering for America’ plan is turning the service over to Elon Musk and DOGE so they can undermine it, privatize it, and then profit off Americans’ loss,” Connolly said.  He continued, “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.” DeJoy’s agreement with DOGE comes as the agency moved to dismantle the department of education this week. On Tuesday, more than 1,300 workers were told they would be losing their jobs, halving the number of employees working for the department and sparking fears that school lunch programs will be likely to disappear amid the cuts. “With research showing school meals are the healthiest meals Americans eat, Congress needs to invest in underfunded school meal programs rather than cut services critical to student achievement and health,” said SNA President Shannon Gleave, RDN, SNS, in a statement this week. Gleave continued, “These proposals would cause millions of children to lose access to free school meals at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs. Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies.”