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USPS signs agreement with DOGE, agrees to cut 10,000 workers: ‘Broken business model’

The service plans to cut 10,000 employees in the next 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program

House Dem goes on screaming rant against Elon Musk, DOGE

Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., goes on tirade against Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency during a House Ways and Means Committee markup on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy informed members of Congress on Thursday he has signed an agreement with the General Services Administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to cut 10,000 workers and billions of dollars from the U.S. Postal Service budget. 

In a letter to Congress, DeJoy lamented that the Postal Service has a "broken business model that was not financially sustainable without critically necessary and core change." 

"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. "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." 

DOGE will assist USPS with addressing "big problems" at the $78 billion-a-year agency, which has sometimes struggled in recent years to stay afloat. The agreement aims to help the Postal Service identify and achieve "further efficiencies."



Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifies before a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the Postal Service on Capitol Hill, Monday, Aug. 24, 2020, in Washington. (Tom Brenner/Pool via AP)

USPS listed such issues as mismanagement of the agency's retirement assets and Workers' Compensation Program, as well as an array of regulatory requirements that the letter described as "restricting normal business practice."

"This is an effort aligned with our efforts, as while we have accomplished a great deal, there is much more to be done," DeJoy wrote.

Critics of the agreement fear negative effects of the cuts will be felt across America. Democratic U.S. Rep. Gerald Connolly, of Virginia, who was sent the letter, said turning over the Postal Service to DOGE would result in it being undermined and privatized.



Ranking member Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., delivers opening remarks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on sanctuary cities' policies at the U.S. Capitol on March 05, 2025 in Washington, D.C.  (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

"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 in a statement. 

He added: "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." 

The National Association of Letter Carriers President Brian L. Renfroe said in a statement in response to Thursday's letter that they welcome anyone's help with addressing some of the agency's biggest problems but stood firmly against any move to privatize the Postal Service.

"Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees' jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily," he said.

USPS currently employs about 640,000 workers tasked with making deliveries from inner cities to rural areas and even far-flung islands.



Elon Musk met with members of the Senate DOGE caucus at the White House. (Getty Images)

The service plans to cut 10,000 employees in the next 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program, according to the letter.

The agency previously announced plans to cut its operating costs by more than $3.5 billion annually. And this isn't the first time thousands of employees have been cut. In 2021, the agency cut 30,000 workers.

As the service that has operated as an independent entity since 1970 has struggled to balance the books with the decline of first-class mail, it has fought calls from President Donald Trump and others that it be privatized. 

Last month, Trump said he may put USPS under the control of the Commerce Department in what would be an executive branch takeover.
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Tech stocks keep tumbling this year. Here’s why
latimes.com
53 minutes ago

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on March 11, 2025.
When President Trump returned to the White House, tech executives from Apple, OpenAI, Oracle and other companies pledged to create thousands of jobs, fuel innovation and invest billions of dollars in the United States.

But technology stocks have been on a bumpy ride this year as trade disputes and the future of artificial intelligence have stoked economic uncertainty.

Trump has gone back and forth about imposing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico and China, which tech giants rely on to produce laptops, phones and other gadgets.

And he’s threatened to levy tariffs on semiconductors that power consumer electronics while criticizing a federal program championed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, that has funded domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

The uneasiness among investors returned this week when some of the world’s most valuable companies, such as Apple, Nvidia and Tesla, shed billions of dollars from their market value after their share prices plunged on Monday.

The losses came after Trump warned in an interview on Fox News over the weekend that “there’s a period of transition” in the coming year and didn’t rule out a recession. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick then told NBC News, “There’s going to be no recession in America.”

“Investors don’t know what’s going to happen around the corner,” said Dan Ives, a Wedbush Securities analyst who covers the technology sector. “It’s been an unsettling time, and that’s why after a massive bull market, you’re seeing, especially major tech stocks, go through just a disaster period to start the year.”

As of Wednesday, the NASDAQ-100 technology sector was down roughly 6% since January and the S&P 500 information tech sector had dropped nearly 10% this year (compared to a 5% drop for the market as a whole).

Various reasons explain the market turbulence, analysts say, pointing to investor worries about tariffs, investment levels in AI and a pullback in consumer spending.

Nvidia’s shares rose 6% on Wednesday but are still down 16% this year; it closed at $115.74 a share. The Santa Clara-based tech company, which makes computer chips, was hit hard in January after Chinese startup DeepSeek announced it had built a cheaper AI model with fewer computer chips.

Nvidia has been bracing for the impact of Trump’s trade policies. During its quarterly earnings call in February, Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said the effect of tariffs are “an unknown” until the company can “understand further what the U.S. government’s plan is.”

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also has seen its stock drop nearly 11% to $169 per share since January. The search giant faces a potential breakup after a federal judge ruled last year that Mountain View, Ca.-based Google illegally maintained a monopoly in online search.

Google plans to appeal, but the Department of Justice under the Trump administration reiterated a proposal to force the company to sell its Chrome browser to restore more competition.

The regulatory scrutiny is happening as Google faces questions about whether AI, which can quickly generate summaries of information, will “seriously impair their core search business,” said Jeff Wlodarczak, a principal and senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group.

As they ramp up their AI investments, tech companies also are spending more than analysts anticipated on capital expenditures such as data centers and servers. Alphabet said it plans to invest $75 billion in capital expenditures in 2025.

“It doesn’t mean AI is not going to be successful, but there’s a concern about what kind of return they’re going to get in all this investment,” Wlodarczak said.

Meanwhile, Meta’s stock has dropped more than 14% in the past month, but the company’s share price is still up since January. On Wednesday, Meta’s stock closed at $619.56 per share.

The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, still dominates in social media; getting more people to use Meta’s AI tools could help it gather more valuable data on the more than 3 billion people who use its platforms daily.

In an earnings call in late January, Meta said it was keeping an eye on “legal and regulatory headwinds” in the European Union and the U.S. that could impact its financial results.

Amid rising tensions between the U.S. and its trading partners, tech companies could find ways to get exemptions from Trump’s tariffs, Ives said.

“I think a lot of this is really just to bring these countries to the table in negotiation,” he said. “But the damage has been done to the market. It’s taken a lot of momentum out and it’s caused a lot of nervousness for investors.”